Kingdom Come
by Nyx-Zephyrus
Summary: The Killer God has won his Utopia. Kira has the world in the palm of his bloodied hand, and he keeps his trophy chained up in his basement. Slash, darkfic, creepiness. Also DISCONTINUED, for all intents.
1. Prologue

Aizawa was the first, suddenly choking on his lukewarm coffee with a grunt and knocking over an end-table as he collapsed to his knees. His colleagues jumped to their feet in concern, one name resounding through all of their minds—Matsuda barely got out half a sentence; "Aizawa, are you—" for he was the second, stumbling and falling to a slump on Aizawa's cooling corpse. Mogi followed; his fists hit the table with a roar, one of half pain and half fury—they'd come _so far_, so close…

_One by one they fall._

Soichiro Yagami took one step back, two—then he whirled, fearful eyes seeking out the only truth he'd yet to find, the only truth that_ mattered_ in this very moment. He met the gaze of his son through a red haze, suddenly staggering with the penultimate agony that electrified his entire being, choking on a sob.

Light looked back at him, hands clasped demurely in his lap. His eyes were grim and—perhaps?—remorseful as he did his father the final honor of watching him die.

And then it was over, and the room fell to a ringing and horrified silence. L's eyes were wide and unblinking, fingers clenched like vices on the arms of his chair as his blank gaze twitched from one prone figure to another, half frozen in shock and half awaiting his own, unbidden, death.

It did not come, and the buzzing of his forgotten computer screens—incuding the one newly-cracked laptop half lodged under Mogi's oddly-stretched arm—suddenly grew to a preposterous roar, resounding in his skull like the shreking of a million wasps angered out of their holes. In one fluid movement, his eyes slid to the only other living occupant in the room.

Light had laid his head to the back of his chair and let it roll awkwardly over one shoulder to look at him. His hands had slipped casually into his pockets, and the smile on his face was the most terrifying thing L had ever seen. It stripped him, suddenly; of his ability to think, ability to _breathe_… made his vision go dark around the edges, as if the light was suddenly being drained from the world. Light. _Light_, who'd thrown pillows at him when he typed too loud in the morning, who'd gotten into ridiculous fights over the nutritional value of soda crackers, who'd matched L's every intellect blow for blow; beautiful Light. Just, gentle Light. Light. _Light._

"_Kira," _he hissed, or tried to; it came out as more of a broken, shuddering breath. _He'd known. _From the first day, the first hour he'd spoken to the Yagami boy he'd known, with the dreadful clutching certainty that defied all odds and dismissed all percentages yet felt so much more real than the numbers ever had. Light rose out of his seat, hands still defiantly in his pockets.

He'd changed completely within those few moments. He curve of his shoulders, the length of his stride; even the faint tightness around his eyes as they glittered and grinned with venom at the dead men on the floor. He ignored the body of his father—some twisted way of respect, L supposed—but nudged Matsuda's shoulder with the tip of one shoe. Only then did he return his gaze to the detective, nightmare smile sliding back into his lips.

"In the flesh." It was almost a purr, a seductive poison in his murderous voice. He nodded mildly toward the monolith computer at L's back. "Your butler appears to be dead as well. All data deletion," he mused over it carelessly, the words foreign on his quicksilver tongue. "I suppose that means all communication channels are closed as well," as if he'd only just thought of it, "that's a pity. I suppose you can't very well call for help. And Rem will have died by now…"

L's mind worked at breakneck speed, racing him through scenario after impossible scenario. Light was Kira. Kira was standing before him. The investigations team was all dead. Quillish was most certainly dead. Light was Kira. L would soon be dead too. Light was Kira.

He wondered only once if he was dreaming. It passed.

Kira had been pacing casually around the headquarter room, gazing with casual disinterest at everything as if he'd never seen it before (like another man seeing the world through Light's eyes—perhaps—an insanity plea—_Light was Kira—). _Now he changed course, looming over L with the same hellish sunshine smile, one hand on each chair arm, leaning in close. L didn't breathe.

"I win."

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"You'll be dead either way," Light had told Rem offhandedly, almost a warning, but more a taunt. His arms crossed over his chest as he leaned against the shiny metal of Ryuuzaki's hallway, a doorframe away from the rest of the investigation team. She'd looked at him, endless obsidian eyes reflecting nothing, but she hated him.

"You will die soon as well, Yagami Light."

He'd smiled lightly, all goodwill. "Is that what my lifespan tells you? I wonder." He shook his head. "But when I die, Misa will write her own name in her Note. I'm sure she's told you that."

The Shinigami had said nothing, gaze drifting away. Light knew she had turned this over and over in her mind— but for a mighty god of death, Rem wasn't a very bright creature. She'd never think of a way to save Misa without submitting to Light. This was too easy, he'd thought to himself. Too easy.

So he'd left her, sliding the door open with one last command. "Remember—all but L. Leave him, and I promise Misa will be spared." He smiled dangerously at the damned god, blood-eyes dancing with pleasure.

"L is mine.

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* * *

_**Introductionish: **GAWD do I hate posting stand-alone prologues. I don't know why I'm doing it other than that I'm tired of staring at this thing and wondering if it's good enough to be my first addition into the revered Death Note fandom. Anyway, chapter one is about half done, so the wait shouldn't be too long. But don't expect the special treatment to last. -shakefist-_

_Annnnyway. This is, I've realized, probably going to turn out to be one of the darkest things I've ever written. Sooo if that floats you, glad to be of service. Thing is... I'm really more of a reader than a writer, and I've noticed that a lot of longer DN slashfics have kind of similar plots. And this little black duck has a bit of an obsession with not writing the norm, so be prepared for such treats as totally-off-the-deep-end!Light and tortured!L and suchlike._

_But in the meantime, Happy Humbug, be well. All I want for Christmas is a review... _


	2. Revelation

_All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast--all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world._

_Rev13:8_

**Chapter Two**

**Revelation**

.X.

**_Eight years later_**

"—_futhermore, specialists speculate that the cure will take less than a month to complete, which means that these kids will be up and running around in no time. Taisu?"_

"_That's certainly wonderful news, Mina. Kira-sama is most generous for allotting the research industry such a large sum of funds in exchange for a waive of patient confidentiality procedures—he's saving more lives than ever before. Justice will prevail! And now I lend you to Shirote, for a look at the upcoming weather around Tokyo…"_

"_Kira is the devil!" _A dirty old man shouted it at the top of his lungs from atop a weathered sedan, megaphone doing nothing to block the flecks of spittle flying from his broken lips. "_Murdering the guilty is no better than murdering the just! Kira's tyranny must end! Rise up and return to the flock before the devil leads you any further astray! Get Kira out of the government! Kira is…"_

People passing on the street scooted away from him in disgust while several police officers, posted on the corners, shook their heads. Speaking such things about Kira-sama was madness—but it was not illegal, not yet. They'd take care of this nut job and any others like him when it was, but not before. As elect force members chosen by Kira himself, the police operated within the strict confines of the law. As it should be.

_Justice will prevail…_

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Light stifled a yawn just before he walked through the sliding glass doors of his office. He hated for his team to see him at all unprofessional.

"Ah, good morning, Kira-sama…" His secretary, Izumi Shozu, gave a respectful little nod, handing him a stack of papers and a Styrofoam cup. Light rather liked Izumi; she was sharp, clever enough to know by now that he didn't like morning pleasantries so much as he liked have his coffee and get to work.

"Good morning." He raised the cup to his lips at he peered dully at the stack of reports; shorter, he noticed, than last week's. This made him smile faintly.

"Down 4.8 percent," Izumi added, referring, of course, to the crime rate in Japan. "You might just be out of work soon, sir."

"I doubt that, Izumi," he said with a sigh, taking his place at his desk and listening to his computer boot up. "Not so long as there is evil in the world…"

She smiled brightly at him, fluttering her eyelashes a little—a solid reminder that he didn't like her _that _much—and went back to work. Light turned his eyes to the Reckoning system on his desktop, opening the first list, and began to read.

Criminals, it seems, were a hardy breed. Even in this world that Light had worked so hard and seen the loss of many good men to achieve, people still saw it as their right to hurt and destroy others. The numbers, of course, had dropped dramatically since the beginning of Kira's reign, but all over the globe there remained those who thought they could escape God's wrath.

The name and case file of every felon from most governments around the world were subsequently sent to Kira's Headquarters in Tokyo, where they were judged according to the ultimate justice. If Kira chose to execute them, he carried it out without the unstable and faulty human court system to contradict him, and if they were spared than it was up to Kira's soldiers, the police force, to deal out punishments.

Most died, though. Kira, unlike the failed law systems from before his reign, understood that to eliminate crime, he must eliminate criminals. The world had never been more at peace. People were united only in Eden.

All the major governments in the world supported Kira's will now. It was only a few small, rebellious peoples that refused to work with him toward peace, but they were swiftly losing ground.

Light checked the cases that were marked for death, and forwarded them to Mikami. Some were difficult. Some people he condemned had underlying causes for their crimes, circumstances unknown to the police. But he could not be lenient. Merciful, but just.

Kira, after all, was just another name for justice.

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"You know, Light," said Ryuk in his car-crash voice, lounging on the ceiling, "the shinigami aren't real happy with you."

"Is that so," he replied absently, taking a sip of his champagne, eyes still trained on the screen through his gold-rimmed reading glasses. He'd taken his work home, as he usually did when the office got too loud and annoying and he began to think about firing all his subordinates. He'd done that a few times before—and while it was easy enough to find qualified workers more than willing to serve under Kira-sama, the hassle was rarely worth it.

"Mmm. You kill so many people that we sometimes can't find one for ourselves—hyuk hyuk hyuk…"

Light shrugged absently, at last leaning back in his leather-studded chair, turning to gaze out the massive double windows behind his desk out at the evening Tokyo skyline. "Not that you have to worry about that. You have your pick of any of my criminals… just pick the one with the most appealing lifeline." He smiled at the rogue shinigami, who grinned back at him in his usual clownish manner—inwardly cackling at the fact that the human _still _thought he could place limits on whom Ryuk killed.

"Yeah, I know… but the _other _shinigami don't care about that. I hear a lot of them say that they'll write _your _name in their Note and be done with it. Hyuk hyuk…" With this final set of _hyuk_s, he dove from his position on the ceiling at the bowlful of apples that Light kept on his desk at all times—and in every other room in the house. Light smirked at him with a trace of mockery, and a trace of fondness. Ryuk grabbed three apples in each hand, stuffing one in his mouth so that his leathery cheeks bulged.

"But they won't, will they?" He purred, sliding off his glasses and folding them neatly on the desk, hands clasping behind his head. "That's your job."

"_Ke-ke-ke-hyuk hyuk hyuk hyuk…"_

Light decided to leave the spasmodic god to his cackling, appleing happiness, turning to save the progress on his computer. Mikami, he knew, was at his own home filling his Death Note with page after endless page of names according to his master's will: with Kira as judge and Mikami as executioner, all sin would eventually be judged.

He paused in the kitchen as he passed, fixing himself a light snack—it was important that Kira stay healthy. He was surprised to find that the champagne was already pleasantly blurring the back of his thoughts; a good thing he'd stopped working, then, as he couldn't allow his mind to be affected in any way while doing such important work.

Before he left, he retrieved a generous slice of double-chocolate cake on a plate, and a small glass of milk. He'd never, it turned out, warmed up to sweets; still couldn't stand the stuff on more than a very distant occasion. But he was sure he could find someone who did.

The heavy door to Light's basement had a fingerprint scan and audio identification built in. He balanced the cup and plate in one hand to lay his palm on the panel and recite his name clearly into the microphone, "Yagami Light." At this the door clunked and fell open, and with the touch of another button on the pad, the wave of discordant noise that had spilled out of the room fell silent.

"Evening, L," he said brightly, striding into the room and setting the dessert down. All around him, television screens moved soundlessly, making the walls erratic and confusing. He was glad he'd installed the auto-mute button, as he knew _he _couldn't stand being in a room with that many voices at once.

Lawliet crouched in his chair in the center of the room, knees hiding his face, head in his chained hands. That was the way Light usually found him these days… didn't blame him, really. All the erratic stimuli had to be taxing on L's already fragile mind.

"Hungry? You must be. I brought you cake." He sat on the small, mostly bare desk, and waited for L to lift his head. When he'd waited for several moments, he pouted faintly. Was he dead? "C'mon, Lawli. Look, show's over."

"Yagami-kun has retained his habit of making remarks in bad humor," L mumbled into his thighs, voice cracking painfully. His hair had grown in his time locked in Light's basement, brushing the backs of his shoulderblades in uncared-for clumps. Light graced him with a smile.

"Oh, L, don't be crabby," he said sweetly. "I know you don't like the TVs much… but how else are you going to see how I've changed the world? Come on, time to eat."

L's neck made an audible cracking noise as he raised his eyes just enough to breach the bony lumps that were his knees. Light had given him only a silky gossamer sheet with which to dress himself, and it wasn't doing a very good job. He kept the bright, taunting smile on his lips as L's empty black eyes stared at him, betraying nothing… oh, but he knew that was a lie. He'd seen those eyes glaze over with pain, dilate sharply as L fell unconscious… burn with an utter hatred that always made Light laugh.

He wanted to see it now. As soon as L ate, he'd suffer his neverending punishment at the hands of Kira. L knew this, which is probably why he was stalling.

Light picked up the fork and cut a small piece of chocolate goo, holding it out to L with the same psuedokind look on his face. "Chocolate," he cooed unnecessarily, "your favorite."

"No, it isn't," L rasped, but, resigned, let the fork fall against his lips. It was clear he took no pleasure in the sweetness anymore.

"So," Light began, glancing around at the screens, "enjoying the new world, Law? I know you wish you could be there to enjoy it, but you know you lost that chance…"

L said nothing, eyes downcast. Light held in a laugh. _How the mighty have fallen._

"But you know," he continued, spooning L another bite of cake, "that I have nothing but respect for you. That's why I let you live, despite your heresy." L scoffed faintly at this, causing Light to smirk wider. Eight years of torture, and he still had the guts to scoff in the face of God… oh, L. what a fun pet he'd turned out to be. "It's true. I just want you to see all the good I've done in the world, L." He smiled and leaned in close, making sure he had his former enemy's attention. "After all, your God is a merciful one."

L raised his ebony eyes from the floor, glaring at Light with the hateful scorn that he'd come to love. He thought he remembered that L's eyes had been dark blue, once… but there was none of the shine that was there before he'd most utterly lost to Kira. And that was much more beautiful, Light thought.

"—not a God, Yagami," L whispered, as though it hurt him to speak. He had a smudge of chocolate on his upper lip. "And there is nothing in your "new world" but death."

Light was silent for a moment, suddenly seething in anger. But he smiled, shrugging flippantly. "You're the only one left who believes that, _Lawliet,_" he replied, reveling in, with a moment of Misa's eyes, the easily-found name. Its use reminded L that he could kill him at any moment without so much as touching him. "And I don't think you really do."

He stood, focusing his attention on one of the screens. It was a news broadcast that he'd seen before. A woman, eyes red with tears, sang Kira's praises into the reporter's microphone, thanking him again and again for judging her ex-husband after he had inappropriately touched their daughter. The girl, not much more than eleven by the look of her, hovered by her mother's side and gave nervous one-word answers to any questions directed at her, but Light could already see in her eyes that she was healing from the abuse. She would grow up to be a strong woman because Kira had given her justice when no one else would.

"They're cleansed," he said quietly, almost in awe of the sanctity of it. "They're not victims any more. The righteous are made clean as the evil is purged from their lives. It's so _beautiful, _L." Turning, he caught his prisoner's eyes again, smiling brightly. "There's no way you can't see it. Even the air feels more pure."

L held his gaze, but said nothing. They went through these motions without fail, though the end result was always the same.

"And you," Light continued, hands sliding into his pockets as he slowly circled L's chair, "almost ruined it. Like the serpent of the devil, you tried to turn the righteous away from their Eden." He laid a hand on L's skeletal shoulder, which almost spasmed as he jumped, trembling but stubbornly refusing to show his discomfort. "I can think of no greater sin."

"I'm sure you can't," L croaked, "having lost the ability to think reasonably along with your sanity."

Light paused briefly before spinning L's chair to face him, causing the chains to rattle noisily, and backhanded him so hard that the chair scooted back several inches. The chains connecting his thin wrists to the floor grew taught with a _clank. _L released a sharp gasp of surprise, but remained stubbornly silent even as his cheek purpled, eyes fixed on a distant point somewhere behind Light's shoulder.

"You're a fool, L," Light hissed, grasping both chair arms in his favorite domineering fashion, so close L couldn't avoid his eyes. "You should never have opposed me. You could have done so much." He was pulling on air, now, his anger crackling between them in almost visible sparks. He meant nothing that he said; L almost cracked a smile at how predictable this pitiful little routine had become. Light's fingers were white where he grasped the chair.

He leaned in gently, pressing an almost delicate kiss to the side of L's neck that wasn't turned defensively away. L just barely stiffened, shoulders subtly shaking with a bit more energy. He'd been forced out of his usual position as his body instinctively moved away from Light, his pale feet touching the floor, fingers twisted in the thin strip of fabric that failed for the most part to cover him. Kira smirked faintly, suddenly more pleased by the fear in L's body than by anything else in the world.

And now he stood, circling the chair again to slide open a drawer on the desk, the only other furniture in the room other than the monolith screens. Light withdrew a long, thin metal rod, capped by a small rectangle of metal. L shut his eyes.

The brand was electric, and heated to glowing in about ten seconds. Light held it horizontally in front of L's face, knowing that he could see it with his mind if not with his eyes.

"You were the only one that might have stopped me, L. But I won. _I _won. You're _nothing_ but my prize." With a hand on the white neck he forced L's head up, skeletal chest exposed and explicitly adorned with the angry red scar the brand had left in the same spot hundreds on hundreds of times. The gothic script spelling Kira's name was a permanent extention of L's body; a mark of his victory. Without another word, Light aligned the brand with the scar and pressed it into the flesh.

L had screamed the first several times; out of more shock than pain, it had seemed. Now he didn't make a sound, didn't even breathe, lips pressed so hard together that they whitened, making the bruises stand further out against his skin. The rod crackled as the burned flesh made a furious hiss, sulfur scent pouring into the air and thickening in Light's throat. His lips stretched painfully with his manic grin, and he thought briefly of Ryuk.

He pulled it away after a few seconds and L only then gasped, breath catching in his throat in what might have been a choking sort of sob. He controlled it quickly, refusing to give Light the satisfaction of seeing his pain, and his nostrils flared with the effort as he forced his mouth shut again. The brand glowed on his newly seared chest and his entire body shook, but he would never let his pride break.

Light straightened, releasing a sigh. The devil grin had melted from his face with the same fleeting ease with which he smiled that world-capturing smile, and now he feigned sympathy as he flicked the electric brand off, setting it back on the desk to cool.

"I am sorry, Law. But there's no avoiding it." He shook his head and resumed his slow circle around L's shaking body. "If you'd only submit to me… just admit that you were wrong." With practiced indifference, he returned his gaze to the screens and studied them. "Admit that I am the true God of this world, and all of it ends. I promise," as if a promise from Light ever lead to anything but more pain.

L only slumped a little further into his chair, lacking the strength to even pull his feet from the floor. He spoke with his eyes still stubbornly closed.

"Some…day," he forced out painfully, "you'll meet with… true justice…Light…"

Light only laughed, picking up the small porcelain plate with half a slice of cake still on it, leaving the glass. He tucked the metal brand back into its drawer and walked away, pulling the heavy metal door almost shut.

"Enjoy the show," was his only goodbye, flicking the button to restore the sound to the television sets. He didn't look away as the door swung shut, enjoying the sight of his most precious prize lying broken and chained, a bloody red "KIRA" marking his body to its true owner. A thousand voices rang out of the room's speakers, praising Kira as the world's messiah.

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_EDIT: changed the chapter numbering to fit better with the FF chapering systems, so this, while theoretically chapter one, is now called two. Chapter one is either called "Prologue" or has disappeared entirely. Sorry. This annoys me SLIGHTLY less. _


	3. Scepter of Faith

_Don't let anyone deceive you in any way, for that day will not come until the rebellion occurs and the man of lawlessness is revealed, the man doomed to destruction. He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in his own temple, proclaiming himself to be God._

_2 Thessalonians 2:3_

**Chapter Three**

**Scepter of Faith**

.X.

The next evening, Light paid a visit to his Executioner. He severely doubted that anything short of apocalyptic proportions could cause Mikami's loyalty to waver, but even he might potentially get frustrated without a certain amount of praise for his efforts.

And he certainly had done a lot for the new world. Years ago, when Light had made his first public appearances as Kira, Mikami had trailed him everywhere he went, making Light's willful death of anyone he chose possible. With a world demanding evidence, it had taken hundreds of examples where he'd been presented with a condemned inmate and told to prove his power, whereupon it was Teru's shingami eyes and hidden Note that had shown Kira to be real. He still made sure his follower was in the audience of any speech or presentation he made, ready to deal with the fairly common occurrence of someone attempting to be a vigilante and singlehandedly take Kira out.

"Mikami," he murmured by way of greeting when he answered the door, smiling faintly at the mix of emotions that leapt to Mikami's face.

"_Kira_-sama!" he gushed, sweeping the door open and actually bowing a little as Light strode inside. Teru's apartment was the upper side of modest; anything more ornate might give away his position as Kira's right-hand man. Although Mikami made it quite clear that he would have been more than happy to serve Light living in a soup can. It was almost impossibly neat in that clinical way that somehow only he could achieve.

"Your Note," Light commanded simply, taking a casual seat on the polished leather couch. Mikami scurried to comply, disappearing to retrieve his Death Note from the hiding place that even Light didn't know. He presented it with a flourish, and the sort of punctual positioning with which a butler might preset a prized bottle of wine.

Light flipped through it carefully, pretending to account for every name and check for accuracy. He'd once actually cross-checked Mikami's work… but found within a year that Mikami triple- and quadruple-checked himself, and never made mistakes to begin with. He was quite proud of himself for acquiring such a capable servant.

L would have seen through their process in an instant. He would have thought to have Kira prove his powers in a way that no one else would know the intended target; in absolute seclusion. But L wouldn't have been afraid of immediate smiting as a result of aggravating him—unlike every social and political world leader that had tried. Then it had been amusingly pathetic. Now it was disgusting.

"You've done well," he told Mikami, purring it in the soft velvet tone that had been capturing women for him since junior high. It had the predictable effect, and he watched almost in fascination of the way the other man's face melted from one type of pleasure to another. He knelt at Light's feet, like a feudal samurai swearing his loyalty to his lord.

And maybe it wasn't that far off. Teru's voice liquefied, adoration cushioning every word. "I live to serve you, Kira-sama."

_Everyone does, _was his thought, making him smile. He leaned over a bit to set the Death Note on the low polished table and laid a hand in Mikami's hair, stroking softly. The strong scent of Indian incense curled slowly through the air; Mikami was an ex-Buddhist, and retained some of the habits even after he'd discovered his true God.

"Our world is almost complete," he said quietly, curling his fingers in the long silk strands and listening to his minion sigh. "We will soon have our Eden."

All sweet nothings, but he knew the effect it would have on Mikami to hear it as "ours" instead of "mine." "Kira…" he sighed adoringly, and Light let the lack of honorific slide. Mikami was a strong man, and Light could transform him into a lovestruck puppy with a few simple words. He'd never met anyone he couldn't sway, after all.

_Except._

He cupped Mikami's face in his palm, looking into the eyes, the weapons. Mikami didn't know that he would never see the lifespan of any Death Note writer… so the lack of the numbers could only mean that his master would never die. Light smiled inwardly, marveling at how the truth was only made clear from behind a lie.

"Let us rule this world together."

He left shortly after that, smiling at Mikami's crestfallen face. But he did, after all, have work to do.

"Home," he told his driver absently, peering out the mirrored windows to see if Mikami was watching him leave. He wasn't, and Light was glad. There was god worship, and then there was creepiness.

Arriving back at the mansion, he wandered to his room without bothering to turn on any lights. Misa was either out or already asleep—and though he honestly didn't care which, he didn't want to risk announcing his presence. Misa had mercifully grown out of most of her squeals and bubbles, and dressed a little less outrageously after she'd quit modeling at his insistence. He'd told her that she was his backup plan—if anything ever happened to him, she would need to take over the role of Kira. While technically that role actually went to Mikami, he supposed she was the backup to the backup plan, and a second set of shinigami eyes was worth keeping around.

And he'd really rather grown to like the silly girl, enough to hold a decent conversation with her at least. They were "engaged" now, and would likely remain so until one of them died… his excuse was Kira's public image, though in reality the thought of marriage made him cringe a little. He didn't know what she did most of the time.

Hanging his shirt neatly on a hamper – he'd be doing it later himself, as he'd never trust a housekeeper—he let his fingers graze over the shrinking scar on his stomach. The only time he'd ever been shot, during a speech in the United Nations. Mikami hadn't been quick enough to stop the gunner, though he'd dropped dead before security even had time to apprehend him.

The incident had given Light an idea, and several months later, a worldwide broadcast had seen Kira receive another bullet, this time an obviously fatal blast to the head. It had, of course, been a look-alike. He'd spent weeks searching the criminal database for a man of his general size and appearance—a small-time arsonist was all he found, not someone he would normally execute. But it had been for the greater good.

When Light had appeared in public only days later, even the most stubborn religious groups began proclaiming Kira to be immortal. He'd instantly received all the support it would have taken another decade to earn using his usual methods.

There were now thousands of temples in Asia and millions of churches worldwide, all dedicated to the religion of Kira. And all it took for a man to be a God was a following that believed he was.

Light typed a thirty-five digit keycode into the small console located beside his bed, sliding the Death Note—the original, he thought it as, the same Note that he'd picked up so many years ago— from the vault in his wall. He touched the cover, flipped the pages, and simply stared at it for a few long, silent minutes, before replacing it carefully in the vault, and turning to dress for bed.

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L had tried to make their joint bedroom as comfortable as he could, within reason, knowing that Light was a teenaged boy and would therefore probably not speak up if he found something not to his tastes. The walls were a subtle cream color, the carpet thick and plush. There was a conveniently-placed television set that the boy never used, but L made sure the remote control stayed on the table near Light's side of the bed. Overall, the room had the same feelings as most hotel rooms; practical, but impersonal.

There were only two windows, neither with the capability to open; one in the bathroom, and one on the wall nearest L's side. The glass was thick and shatterproof.

It was currently 3:34 in the morning, and Light slept facing him. L sometimes wondered at this; people who slept on their side, slightly curled, usually displayed more insecurity and defensiveness in their overall personality. People who were confident and comfortable, like Light, generally slept on their backs.

L himself couldn't remember a time when he'd actually lain down with the intention of sleep. He returned his attention to his laptop—a double-check on sudden criminal deaths _before _Kira had been thought to exist—for a moment, but soon found his gaze returning to the sleeping face beside him, lit by the half-moon and the glittering Tokyo skyline.

Such an absolute enigma, this boy named Light. L had never found anything, or met anyone, that caused the tumult of emotions in him that Light did—at times such _certainty, _and such utter confusion only moments later. Light stunned him. Sometimes it was pleasant, like an epiphany one reaches after a brief moment of happiness rather than hours or years of difficult thoughts. Those times made him smile, just faintly, at the thought that Light might actually _like _him. Many people admired him—children gave up their futures to get in the running to _be _him, after all—but he didn't think anyone had ever actually, really, just liked him before.

But sometimes when Light stunned him it made a tremor run down his spine, dark vibrating chills of fear and something else that he could never really name.

Frowning, L trained his eyes on his monitor.

His current criminal criteria was from America—a country more renowned for freak heart attacks than any other, he thought wryly—and the records he was looking at now were from years before Kira had become so much as an urban legend in Japan. He didn't, if he were to be honest, have any idea what he was looking for. He simply trusted that he would know if he found it, and continued to scroll halfheartedly through face after ugly, murderous face.

Light stirred beside him suddenly, giving a sleepy little sigh… and L counted the seconds before the young pseudo-detective would say his name in an exasperated manner.

… two, one.

"_Ryuuzaki,_" Light groaned, rolling onto his back and flinging a forearm over his eyes like a _femme fatale _from one of those old silent movies that Watari thought he hadn't noticed cluttering his shelves. "Put the damned thing away. Y'r annoying as hell."

"My apologies. I had thought Yagami-kun was sound asleep." He took the moment to subtly stretch his fingers, peering at Light out of the corner of his eyes. In the darkness, the boy wouldn't have the facilities to notice and thereby get defensive, a result of that peculiar human habit of spending so much time on their appearance and then becoming thoroughly insulted when looked at.

Light grumbled something unintelligible, batting a hand in L's general direction. Soon, though, he tugged the light sheets off of himself and began to sit up, causing the chain that connected their wrists to clink together faintly. "Get up. I have to go to the bathroom." The sleep was gone from his voice—L suspected that Light was always alert when he work up, regardless of the circumstances—as if he was only pretending to be groggy, as that was the way teenagers were expected to behave—

He nodded and uncurled himself from the little niche he'd dug in the bed, following his chainmate toward the facilities. He _suspected, _but he had no way to _know. _There was no way to know anything for sure when it came to Light.

"Is Yagami-kun hungry?" he inquired when the teenager emerged, twisting his fingers together idly to keep them from twitching at the loss of the keys.

"No," said Light, running a hand through his hair, "but I bet _you _are, which means a trip to the kitchen anyway, right?"

"If Yagami-kun doesn't mind…"

Within a few minutes, L was holding a china cup of steaming blackcurrant to his lips, inhaling the syrupy scent. Light had gotten a glass of water and was draining it slowly, angled at a way so as not to notice L's eyes trained unblinkingly on him over the edge of his teacup. He watched the long, slow strokes of Light's throat as he swallowed, the way his otherwise unpronounced Adam's apple moved rhythmically under the skin. There was something aesthetically soothing about it, he mused, returning his attention to his tiramisu as the boy finished his drink. Like the sound of the ocean, or the hypnotic mechanical _whirr _of a running computer modem.

"Find anything?" Light asked, referring to the Kira research. L shook his head, spooning a bit of cake and letting it dissolve fully on his tongue as his reply formulated itself.

"I'm afraid Kira is simply much too clever to allow an easy clue," he said, deciding that watching Light's reaction to the subtle praise would be unwise and simply listened; for a change in the boy's breathing, or a particular tone in his voice. He felt Light nod.

"Well, we knew that. But he must make mistakes," his voice was thoughtful, meditative. As if unsure whether or not his words were true. _Did _Kira make mistakes, after all? "We've got to just keep doing what we're doing and something will have to turn up."

Nothing. _Nothing. _"Yes," said L, tapping his lips with his fork, "I suspect you are right."

Light was Kira. Light was not Kira. He must be. He couldn't be.

_Shouldn't be… _

He put the rest of his tiramisu in the refrigerator, finding himself suddenly without appetite. They returned to bed: L to his files, Light to his attempts at rest.

L stared at the screen for several minutes, until the words ran together like the tracks of some small, incredibly militiant animal.

"Light-kun…?"

"Mm."

The tip of his thumb lodged itself between his teeth. "Do you think Kira is evil?"

There was a beat during which Light probably wondered what prompted such a non-statistical question. The room was all muted grays, with only a hazy sheen staining them both red from the glittering Tokyo sky.

"Yeah, of course."

L nodded without blinking, tearing off a small sliver of a thumbnail. "Of course," he repeated. "Goodnight, Light-kun."

"'night."

.X.

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L did not want to open his eyes. When he did, everything would be back: the unstoppable noise, the never-ending television screens. When he slept, he'd learned how to block out the sound until he could hear no more than a faint murmuring, but this skill did not extend into his waking hours. He was aware that he was asleep, which meant he was slowly ascending the ladder of consciousness... and he tried as hard as he could to slow the climb. He would wake up soon… which meant the dreadful cacophony of voices would swell to a roar and reverberate in his head—

But presently—fuzzily, as if his brain had been covered by a thin membrane that was slowing his perception—L realized that he _was _awake, but the hazy silence remained. With a spark of muted humor, he wondered if he'd actually gone deaf. But no… there was a simpler explanation…

His eyes snapped open, directly into the face of Kira.

Yes, his mind told him despairingly. This was Kira. Light… his Light… was nowhere to be found.

Sometime—either before or after he'd fallen asleep—L had ended up on the floor, flat on his back. The chair he usually sat (lived) in had rolled away, too far for him to reach with the length of his chains. Kira was crouched above him, balancing on the balls of his feet and grinning maliciously at his prisoner.

"Sleep well?"

His throat worked soundlessly for a few seconds. "Yes, thank you," it was his usual harsh whisper, and it made the skin around Kira's eyes tighten in pleasure. He rolled back on his heels, raising a hand to brush L's black strands out of his eyes.

"I like your hair longer. Makes you look like a girl." That was probably true, though L suspected he looked more like a zombie than anything else—he was thoroughly malnourished, frail, and his cheekbones felt as if they could be used as weapons. Also, he couldn't remember the last time he'd washed. The dried blood on his skin felt like needles, pinching and pulling faintly wherever it touched.

"Ah," he croaked faintly. It felt as if he was dying of thirst. "I have… harbored suspicions… that Yagami-kun is secretly heterosexual."

"Mm-mm," Kira corrected, unfazed; "Gods are not limited by gender."

"So I understand," said L, before he had to roll onto his side and cough so violently that his entire frame—for what it was—rattled. He was left shaking, overtaxed body making its weaknesses known. Kira chuckled, then tutted mildly.

"I told you," he murmured, "you need to eat right or you're going to get sick."

L said nothing, content to tremble naked on the floor at Kira's feet. His captor stood, stretching his arms behind his head as if he too had just woken up.

"I decided to take the day off today," he explained needlessly, although he didn't look it; his clothes were business-casual at best, all neat folds and straight lines. "I can't afford to be stressed. My work is very exacting."

"Mm, I can see," L responded, wondering why he still insisted on provoking the man, "how the writing of… names in a notebook could account to… severe physical strain."

Kira only smiled, circling L's body in that predatory manner he liked so much. He had a lot of possessive mannerisms that didn't seem to fit with his usual sociopathisms; his habit of using a name often, for example. "Look at this, L." "Time to get up, Law." "Oh look… you're bleeding, L." It was a mark of ownership, much the way teenage girls felt the need to verbally possess their boyfriends. Like he needed to _own_ L in every possible way…

Although L suspected his appreciation for knowing a person's name could be explained.

"I was thinking about you," Kira said, eyes gazing around with a practiced disinterest at nothing. "Last night, in bed. Misa talks in her sleep, you know." Somehow that came as no surprise. "You were a much better bedmate."

"Yagami-kun had nothing but complaints at the time."

A shrug. "I was young," he dismissed. "Naïve about a lot of things." He suddenly smirked down at L, tilting his head to look him in the face. "I probably didn't pay enough attention to you, did I?"

L said nothing. Just let him talk himself out.

Kira knelt, cupping L's brittle cheek in his hand. "You had Kira in your bed for months," he said softly, and the venom in his voice was almost lost behind his smile. "And you knew it, you sorry bastard. But you couldn't touch me." He leaned down so that his breath swept across L's forehead, shifting his sweat-slicked hair. "That's very unprofessional, L."

Shut his eyes. Fear was useless and unnecessary, and would change nothing.

Kira continued. "You let your judgment be clouded. You _were _a good detective. Probably the best until you confused yourself with your emotions…"

"No." L couldn't stay silent, and had only a vague idea of what he was protesting. This was just as bad as the brand. Worse.

"You were in love with me."

"_No—_."

"You're _still _in love with me, you sick little shit. I've beaten you unconscious and killed everyone you've ever known, and you're still the simpering little coward that I spared out of mercy. Execute _me?_" he sneered, tossing L's words back at him through a vortex of time and agony. L shook his head mutely, wanting to deny it, to tell this madman exactly where he could put his theories… but his abused throat rejected him, choosing instead to close against him with the texture of gravel, making it difficult to breathe.

Kira laughed at his discomfort. "Look at you, L;" he rolled the severely underweight body over with the nudge of one finger. "Now I see why you had to hide behind a screen. Maybe if you hadn't caved and shown your prime suspect your face, you wouldn't be here."

He let his eyes stare blankly up at the ceiling; there were screens up there as well, though not as many, so it was only the edges of his vision that shimmered and danced, jerking his subconscious in the tender places, slowly eroding. He stared so long that his vision blurred, and he willed himself to be suddenly struck blind. That, at least, would keep him from seeing Light—_Kira, _his mind corrected viciously—looking at him from behind those eyes of madness.

When, he wondered for far from the first time, had the boy with the notebook snapped? Was it during the rush of power he'd felt when his memories had returned…? One of the many faceless days that L had watched him like a hawk for all the wrong clues…? Or had it been the very first time he'd realized that he'd taken a human life… and would do so again without hesitation?

Perhaps he was simply born insane, like a sleeping serpent deep inside him that had slowly slithered out when the circumstances had aligned to feed it. Perhaps there was, by extension, a Kira in the heart of every man.

_The evil implanted in man by nature spreads so imperceptibly, when the habit of wrong-doing is unchecked, that he himself can set no limit to his shamelessness__…_

…Cicero. He and Light had sometimes played a game, one quoting an obscure work and the other naming its creator. He couldn't think of a single occasion where either had missed the mark.

"Nothing to say?" Kira sneered, a kind gesture by comparison, and rose to his feet. He slipped out of L's field of vision, though he suspected it was safe to assume his captor to be pacing.

He let his eyes drift to a screen near the corner, currently playing a crime drama. _Those _had certainly changed over the last few years, suddenly becoming a lot less diverse in storyline, and the ending was almost always the same: once the perpetrator had been found out and caught, the case was handed over to Kira, and all was well. L suspected the movie industry had suffered in silence.

"I'm disappointed." Even his _voice _had changed, tones more flippant and unpredictable as he shifted violently from one mood to another—a trait common in psychopaths, L remembered faintly. "I admit I had a lot of hope for you, L. You could have ruled the world with me."

Still he said nothing. Around and around and around did they dance, this never-ending Macabre in which Kira proved again and again, if only to himself, that his victory over the once-mighty L was absolute.

Kira stepped over him, hands on his hips, bending at the waist with one foot on either side of his chained once-enemy, grinning down at him with a spectral smile, eyes glinting dangerously. "Would you have liked that, Lawliet? To be at my side on the day I am crowned king of all that is pure and just?"

"You talk a lot," said L, intending it to come out a lot less faint and powerless than it did. His eyes fell from the ceiling, resting instead somewhere near the floor as he cast his face aside in shame—weak.

He barely noticed as Kira slowly straightened, gazing down at him with eyes like hardened flint ready to spark and burst into flame. But he _did _notice the hard-toed shoe that suddenly dug itself into his exposed ribs, the strength of the kick knocking him sideways and jarring his shoulder on the concrete floor. He choked, fighting for air as a haze of black-red clouded over his eyes. He might have thought he'd be used to pain by now.

"I don't much _appreciate,_" another kick, this time straight to the center of his chest where the blistering scar still burned, scraping the tender wound open, "all your stupid little _comments, _L." Now one to his hip, clattering on the protruding pelvic bone which made a dangerous _crack. _L gasped for breath, beyond the point of letting Kira see his weakness—the pain made him convulse, all rational thoughts fleeing his mind because it _hurt _so much—

"Who do you think I _am?_" Kira ranted, ceasing his merciless attack only to storm off in what L presumed to be the direction of the desk. The red haze cleared a little and he was met with the sight of his scraped knees. He appeared to have curled into the fetal position by instinct. "Why won't you get it through your ugly head? I am KIRA! I rule this world! You're nothing! _Nothing!_ _L is_ _dead!_" The desk drawers rattled and crashed as he blindly raided them, one torture device after another clattering to the floor.

And Lawliet smiled bitterly, because it was true.

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* * *

_SO. For Christmas this year, I recieved the following: an "L" keychain, which I shamelessly converted into a necklace and am wearing now; the first two DVDs; a keychain flashlight that projects the "L" symbol; an actual Death Note notebook, complete with How To Use; Death Note military tags proclaming me to be Kira; lots of squee-inducing feedback on _Kingdom Come;_ and a little Ryuk figurine._

_Personally, I didn't think my obsession was THAT obvious. But it seems I'm fairly easy to read. ;)_

_I like this chapter a little more than the last one, but not much. I'm just like that, though. As to the general thought that the story sort of dived headfirst into very shallow water: it's rather supposed to be abrupt. To make you blink and go, "... seriously? He did it? But he's nuts! How can you not see he's nuts!? U stupeed polititian people!" Not that this is excusing my personal habit of skipping over important details because I'll be the first to admit that I'm impatient as all hell and my work suffers for it, but this time it's actually how I envisioned the story to go. _

_--SPOILERS-- More than that, though: instead of in the actual series, where "L vs. Kira" came to a bit of a draw considering that Light ended up most thoroughly pwnd, _Kingdom Come _is what I envision as an absolute win on the part of Kira, complete with world domination. But as we all know... "valour is short, and victory fleeting..."_

_I do not apologize for criminally long Author's Notes. That is why I place them at the end, so you are free to ignore them. :) _


	4. Vertigo

_Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof?  
Revelation 5:2 _

**Chapter Four  
**

**Vertigo**

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"But we really had a lot of the same ideas," Light said musingly, swirling a finger around in the warm water. He'd converted a small side-room in his basement into a sparse washroom, accommodating enough for L to relieve himself and occasionally bathe when Light permitted it. Today he'd actually filled the tiny, cramped bathtub to allow the man some comfort. "Myself becoming Kira and you being a detective. You just went about it the wrong way."

L, curled typical L-style in the water with his knees against his chest, sighed quietly. The bathwater was stained a rusty off-red from the blood that had washed out of his wounds, especially the one on his chest. "You are hardly one to talk, Yagami-kun."

"Your sense of justice was skewed because the world's justice was skewed. I suppose it was never really your fault."

L shook his head, long hair swirling in the water around him. "You never judged, Light. You never righted any wrongs. All you ever did was murder."

Around and around and around and around. "Oh, L." Light sighed. His good mood today was almost startling; not only allowing L a modicum of luxury, but failing to lash out on unpredictable measures. L's suspicion was at its highest on the days when Light was kind. "I know you don't believe that. You're just clinging to your pride."

"You may have fooled the world. You will never fool me."

Light grinned at him. "Never, hmm?"

L lowered his head so that the pinkish water lapped against his chin.

"All you ever knew was what the world told you," Light explained softly, reaching out to brush his fingertips against L's pale, bonelike shoulder. "That _this _crime in return deserved _that_ crime, and that anything could be worked around if one has a talented enough lawyer… that was how the world _worked _before I came."

"Yes, before all crime deserved death… even false accusations and redeemable sins."

"Your morality," said Light, "is relative. The _world's _morality is relative because it changes so easily as a result of something as predictable as time."

"I would still despise what you have done," L muttered, remembering the Light he used to know, "no matter the era."

"Would you?" his voice was even, his arguments profound. Never had an insane man ever made so much sense, L thought miserably. "Would the thought even cross your mind if I had been a Roman emperor? In a society when killing another man was so common it was encouraged as a spectator sport?"

"You encourage the viciousness you claim to condemn."

"Not at all," said Light, eyes bright with pleasure. "That's the point, L! Murder is wrong. Thieving is wrong. Rape, assault, abuse—all of these things ruin lives. They have _always _been wrong."

L shut his eyes. He did not feel clean.

"But every government in history has been flawed," the man who was Kira continued, slipping his hand out of the water and leaning back onto the concrete wall. "because they invariably changed to make way for another. Modern morality has been so distorted by thousands of years of unchecked evil that it was completely and totally ineffective. Justice was a lost ideal."

"… doesn't give you the right…"

Light laced his fingers, gaze drifting to the darkened ceiling. "But _my _morality is complete. It's undisturbed because I don't allow the biases and tainted influence of anything other that what I _know _to be right. My justice is perfect, because it is beyond the influence of evil." And L could see how an entire world had come to believe it. Light _looked _pure, the earnestness in his face and heart could be enough to convince anyone that he really was heaven-sent, untouchable by the vileness that the world had become.

"Evil influence_?" _L shot, removing his hands from his face. His entire body ached—a testament that, no matter the feelings of the world, Yagami Light could not be less heavenly. "The tool for your tyranny is a notebook from the realm of death, and you believe you are above evil _influence? _You foolish, deluded—"

"The Death Note," Light interrupted him, smiling faintly, "is exactly that, L: a tool. Another man might have been wrongly influenced by the power in the book… in the wrong hands, it _would _be a terrible thing. That's why I am so thankful that it came to me, who would only use it to make things better. And the world needed me, L, so desperately. It was rotting from the outside-in, burning in the hell that it had made for itself."

"And your world is so different," L murmured, wishing he could make the words come more bitingly than they did. "Where the guiding rule is fear, where the name "Kira" is a condemnation…"

And Light reached for him, holding his face in his hands. "It _is," _he whispered, eyes looking as if they held the secret to all joy in the universe. "Fear creates order. In time, when the murderers and thieves and destroyers have fallen, there will _be _no fear. No pain, no hate, no suffering. _That _is Eden. That is all I've ever wanted."

L met his eyes, seeking out the truth. Because there _was _madness there, a petty, childlike psyche that only wanted what it wanted because it wanted it… but there was also light, and a warped sort of innocence that somehow—through all the evil that infected the man, swirling around him in such an obvious place that _no one ever noticed it_—survived.

Light's intentions, he knew, had always been good. But he'd too easily been overpowered by Kira's.

"One thing, Yagami-kun, conflicts with your theory." Light reached over him to let the water drain from the tub, and L mourned silently to see it go.

His captor humored him as he snapped the handcuffs back on L's too-thin wrists. "What's that?"

"Every deity, in every mythos, in every era, had two things," said L, sleepless ebony eyes burning into him; "immortality, and the ability to create. You possess neither. Your only power is the ability to destroy."

Light looked at him with pity in his eyes, draping a white fuzzy towel around his nemesis's skeletal form. "You're wrong, L. It's true that I am not immortal, and I will die someday. But I can create." He touched the pale lips gently, ink-stained fingers impossibly kind; too gently for the world's worst murderer. "And someday, I'll show you what I have created."

.X.

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"Welcome back," said Misa as Light climbed the stairs from the basement, the cuffs of his sleeves stained dirty crimson. Her wide hazel eyes watched him ceaselessly—he'd almost preferred the blue contacts, now that he thought about it—as he strode toward his room, unbuttoning his damp shirt.

"Thanks." It disturbed him a little that Misa knew what he did in the basement, but she'd never said anything, only helping him clean up when he needed it and washing his blood-crisped clothes without so much as a second glance. He was incredibly pleased that the woman had grown out of her more annoying tendencies, though he thought she looked rather depressed these days.

It was hardly surprising. He didn't know what she did most of the time, and he didn't much care. "Mikami Teru called your cell phone," she said quietly when he returned, clad in a fresh black sweater. "I didn't answer."

Good. "Thanks, Misa-Misa," he said, using the old stage nickname that she'd liked so much. He kissed her briefly, which made her smile, bringing back some of the sparkly energy that had defined her when they'd first met.

"I love you, Light-kun. And I made you lunch," she added brightly, following him into the kitchen to prove it. Two small bento boxes were set out, complete with smiling riceballs. It didn't hurt, thought Light, that she was indeed a wonderful cook.

They sat down to eat together, Misa making a few idle comments that he answered genially as he checked his pocket organizer to see if he'd forgotten any accounts today—he hadn't, as expected. Mikami calling him at his personal number was fairly rare, and he humored himself in thinking that the man was just getting lonely.

Misa fell silent after a few minutes, and something about the suddenness of it made him look up at her in half-concern. "Is anything wrong?"

She paused for a moment, making it clear that something was, but then smiled brightly. "No, Light-kun. Is the bento good?"

"Very." He smiled. Whatever it was, she'd get over it soon enough. Or not.

Presently he finished, standing and collecting both boxes. "Gochisosama deshita," he said with a bow, making her giggle a little, and took both her hands to press his lips to each one in turn. "I suppose I should call Teru." He made it sound resigned. She frowned slightly but nodded, and stayed silent as he slipped back into his bedroom and shut the door.

She wasn't as easy as she used to be, he thought, but these little displays of romance kept her happy for the most part. Stretching out on his king-sized bed, he flipped open his cell and dialed Mikami.

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"Ryuuzaki." Light's voice wavered slightly.

L blinked at him owlishly from over the veritable wibbling mountain of foodstuffs, piled with utmost care into a large bowl he currently had cupped in both hands. "Yes," he replied carefully, "Yagami-kun?"

"That," said Light, "is disgusting."

Taking care not to upset the balance of the pile, L looked at the food and then back at Light. "Why do you say that?"

Light stared at him. "It's…" he made a vague hand gesture, apparently explaining what it was in a mysterious sign-manner. "You dumped _everything _in there."

L examined this remark, staring fixedly at his snack. "Not everything," he countered logically. "But the food stocks are slightly low this evening, and I determined that I would not be satisfied with the minimal servings of sweets that were left in the refrigerator. Placing them all in the same dish was the most conservative maneuver."

And it really wasn't much. All they'd had left was two scoops of mint ice-cream, a slice of chocolate-pecan cake, four Oreos, twelve Jell-o cubes, a spoonful of vanilla pudding, three shortbread cookies, some chocolate-dipped peanuts, and a candied plum. L, knowing that Light had no intention of eating any of these things himself, was thoroughly mystified as to what the boy was so upset about.

Light, meanwhile, looked as if he was growing increasingly upset. "You," was his comeback, "are icky."

L craned his neck around slowly, staring at his comrade with impossibly wide, startled eyes, quite unsure he'd heard correctly. "…. "icky," Yagami-kun?"

"I cannot think of another human being who could handle your eating habits," said Light, brow furrowing deeper the longer he looked at the bowl. Sometime between kitchen-trip number eight and now, they'd called a temporary ceasefire on the Kira files if only because no one could concentrate long enough to get from one to another. The team members were taking their respective breaks, darting home to shower and running errands they hadn't gotten around to. "Your triglycerides have got to be through the roof. I've never seen you even _look _at anything with any semblance of nutritional value. Do you not care about your body at all?"

They shared a long stare-down at this. L let his lips fall slowly open, noting out of the corner of his eye that his ice-cream was melting.

"…"_icky_," Yagami-kun?"

The sudden and fascinating process of Yagami Light becoming noticeably pinker was disappointingly interrupted by the sudden appearance of Matsuda, making an apologetic face as the door he opened accidentally banged against the wall. He had a large commercial cardboard box in his arms, causing him to back awkwardly through the doorway. "Food," he explained breathlessly. Seemed like he'd been the one to volunteer to march L's sugar rations up sixteen flights again. Typical Matsuda.

He passed through into the kitchen, another bang on another door, and left the room awkwardly silent. L bit hard on a chuckle, spooning himself a bite of pudding and two chocolate-covered nuts. Light looked at him in horror.

"You're still going to eat that?"

"It is credible food, Yagami-kun. I do not like to waste that which still has value."

"It's _barely_food, Ryuuzaki."

"Making untrue statements is most unlike you, Yagami-kun, and it does not suit you well. I make a point of ensuring that everything I eat meets the human criteria for consumption." There was a crash from the direction of the kitchen. Neither of them blinked.

Light shook his head in disbelief, which L happily determined to be a concession of defeat. He cupped the bowl in both hands, smiling in a way he'd discovered that most people found disturbing. The chain connecting the two of them clinked musically.

"If Yagami-kun is truly so concerned for my well-being," he said, holding the mostly-melted dessert mix out to boy, "perhaps he would like to investigate the quality of my dinner for himself?"

Light made a small sound in the back of his throat that sounded suspiciously like a gulp, brilliant doe-eyes quite round.

"No…" he said slowly, voice strained, and scooted almost imperceptibly in the reverse direction, "thank you… Ryuuzaki."

L suddenly couldn't help it; he hunched over slightly more than usual and laughed, a bizarre convulsing sound that felt alien in his throat. The strangeness of it made him stop almost immediately, and he noticed Light cracking a smile.

A small zipping sound was emitted by L's computer, and a small "W" icon appeared in the corner of his screen.

"E-mail from Watari," Light predicted, turning to pick up the glass of water next to his own screen and sipping at it briefly before stationing both hands at his keyboard. The air between them subtly, quietly, shifted back to normal.

L nodded, already scanning the attachments and taking mental notes.

"Yes," he said in a monotone, doubling the information so that it appeared on Light's screen as well. "Six more murders in the Shinjuku district. Look at this…"

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Light's eyes narrowed slightly, turning Mikami's information over in his mind. "Really," he replied slowly. "What were the names?"

"I've found over twenty-five of them, Kira-sama. Some were submitted more than once, from different countries, and for different crimes, but they were all definitely the same face. I was just looking over some of the cases from last year, and—"

"_What,_" Light repeated, "were the names?"

"Oh… ah, there was… David Keaton, Chris Patton, Ichiko Seiza, Dominic S. Patran—from France—Giovanni Banti…"

He listened as Mikami rattled off the names, trying to connect a pattern or a name that he recognized. Apparently, he'd discovered a chain of criminal cases submitted to the office of Kira over the last few years with a picture of the same man. Just hearing his servant's description, Light couldn't think of what this could mean. The obvious conclusion was that they were simply men who looked alike, but he trusted Mikami's observational skills more than that.

"Fine," he interrupted after seventeen names. "Check every case you have on record and see if he appears again. Look for a common trait. I'll be over in the morning to see what you've found."

"Ah. Yes, sir." Mikami sounded justifiably daunted. He probably had thousands of criminal profiles from over the years on his computer.

Light nodded to himself, still slightly disturbed. "Mikami," he added.

"Sir?"

"Well done. You'll be rewarded for this."

He could practically hear the man squirm, sleepless nights be damned. "Thank you, Kira-sama," he said with muted excitement. "I faithfully serve…"

Light hung up, placing the phone distractedly on the mattress beside him. His role as Kira had, over the last few years, been running so smoothly that he'd begun to despise any unforeseen errors, and stressed disproportionately over them.

He had to remain rational. It was, more than likely, a fluke or mistake of some kind. But he couldn't allow mistakes. How had _he _not noticed the flaw?

Every several seconds, he felt his gaze slip discretely in the direction of the vault in his wall.

Logic dictated, of course, that it was utter foolishness to carry his Death Note around with him; if the public ever found out it existed, Kira would effectively be over. He took it out every evening ritualistically, half to ensure that he never went too long without reclaiming his ownership, and half to reassure himself that it was safe. The vault was set up in the same manner as his old booby-traps had been; if an attempt to open it was made without his number code and simultaneous fingerprint verification it would self-destruct, destroying both the book and the intruder. He hated that such precautions had to be taken if it risked the safety of the Note, but protecting himself was ultimately more important. There was always Misa's Note, and Mikami's if it came to that.

But now he felt a _need _to touch it, as if it was in imminent danger if he didn't hold it in his hands. He fumbled just slightly with the code—_almost _triggering the trap—but caught it in time.

The calm that rolled over him as he traced the thin spine of the Note was pleasingly drug-like; he felt the muscles in his shoulders slowly uncurl, his breathing become slow and deep. Not a day went by that he didn't imagine what his life—and the world—might have been like if he'd never picked up that precious, innocent-looking book. He couldn't envision either one lasting as long as it had.

He flipped through page after page of worthless, meaningless names belonging to meaningless people. They were _all_where they belonged, and all that was left of them was Kira's legacy in his book of power. As it should be. And nothing would ever stop him, now.

The thought made him laugh, ringing off the walls of the apartment and evaporating all his tension. Of course everything was fine. He was God! The whole world fell to their knees before their King. Even L...

Misa's hands, in the next room, tightened on the edges of the little wooden bento box she'd been holding, though her face didn't change as she smiled faintly, mistily, to herself. Behind her, Ryuk tugged on the leather harness in which his Death Note was strapped, wondering what in the world was so hilarious about the thing. Chalking it up to another endless human absurdity, he drifted through the hallway wall to see if one of the soap operas he liked was on.

.X.

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.X.

.X.

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**Connecting….**

**Connected.**

**-HXWHAM has signed on**

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**wb Hax. all good ?

**HXWHAM03:**Good enough. Too many downloads at once, overloaded the cache. I miss anything?

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**ntm

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**freakin empty tonight

**HXWHAM03:**lol

**HXWHAM03:**Well it's not like a lot of people know how to log on here.

**Zetsuboubilly:**yo, Hax.

**HXWHAM03:**Omg Billy! Haven't seen you in forever. What's up?

**Zetsuboubilly:**ntm.

**-xXningenSUCKERXx mimics billy **

**Zetsuboubilly:**stfu nin :P

**Zetsuboubilly:**neway I had to go to france for a week.

**Zetsuboubilly:**my second uncle or whatever died in prison

**Zetsuboubilly:**prbly Kira, so it serves him right

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**cool.

**HXWHAM03:**Gotcha. Sounds boring.

**-xXningenSUCKERXx says GO KIRA **

**HXWHAM03:**STFU again, nin.

**Zetsuboubilly:**better watch it, Hax is anti-Kira :P

**Zetsuboubilly:**he'll virus you if you piss him off.

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**lol

**HXWHAM03:**I am not anti-Kira. :P

**Zetsuboubilly:**only cuz it's illegal XD

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**lol

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**watch out for heart attacks Hax

**HXWHAM03:**Haha. Kira couldn't kill me.

**Zetsuboubilly:**gonna miss you, buddy

**Zetsuboubilly:**besides if Kira dont off you then his devotees will.

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**my dad wud shoot you in the face. nobody talks shit against King Kira in my house lol

**HXWHAM03:**What, is he one of those religious nuts? Kira is god and all that shit?

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**yeah

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**hes supposed to go work in the headquarters next week

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**bought a new car to celbrate. really freaking expensive one

**Zetsuboubilly:**weeeeirdo lol

**HXWHAM03:**work for Kira, huh?

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**yep

**HXWHAM03:**That is pretty cool.

**HXWHAM03:**You live in Tokyo right nin?

**xXningenSUCKERXx:**yep

**HXWHAM03:**So, what does your dad do?

.X.

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Every few minutes, the whirlwind of noise would blend into an indiscernible crackling, buzzing noise that was almost merciful by comparison. But it passed in a few too-swift seconds, and the voices assaulted his mind again.

Still, L trained himself to think rationally. He used one of the smaller screens, set to a channel that played news on an almost twenty-four hour schedule, to keep track of the time. He carefully analyzed himself, coming to terms with how close he was to starvation or, after some of his harsher encounters with Light, how close to bleeding to death.

_"Federal agents seized computers, computer disks and financial records in a raid on Tanabe's home in September. Tanabe, who said at the time that he had gathered at least 150 million e-mail addresses, was arrested—"_

He focused on reports like these—anything that wasn't the Gospel of Kira—until a choice word was spoken. _Arrested. Convicted. _By instinct, he retracted from words like those like prey from a predator, eyes darting around the moving walls to find something _anything _that didn't proclaim the justice, the joy, the miraculous power that was the world's greatest killer.

He thought often that Light perhaps monitored what was played on the monstrous montage to make sure that L never escaped. Ludicrous—not even Light had the resources to control an endless video feed _and _run an empire—but he found his thoughts becoming more and more ludicrous as time passed. An inevitability, and probably the one that Light was counting on as the point of this little exercise: all he'd left was L's mind, and he was determined to strip even that away.

L was quite certain that he would eventually win that final prize, but he saw no reason to help the process along.

_"Japanese Foreign Minister Masahiko Komura said Friday that Japan will extend a total of 30 billion yen in aid to Africa for such purposes as refugee relief, food assistance and support for U.N. peacekeeping operations in the region. With economy functioning at an all-time high due to the drastic decrease in necessary funding toward the law enforcement industry, the United Nations is looking to Japan for financial support. Religious figure Yagami Light, also known as Lord Kira, had this to say—"_

Switch, focus, repeat. He'd never felt so cornered by world news.

But, he thought vaguely, eyes casting around blankly for a neutral screen and coming to rest on a commercial for breakfast cereal, Kira hadn't won his perfect world yet. The fact that there were still governments, and that there was anyone that still referred to him as simply a "religious figure" instead of some bastardized deity, meant that Light wouldn't rest his crusade. It was _close—_religions of India worshiped him as another Buddha; Muslims praised the second coming of Mohammed and the Roman religions thought he was Christ. Even the holy battle for Jerusalem had abruptly come to a close as men had stopped caring about dominating one another—Kira was the man of a thousand faces, and he'd united the parts of the world that could never have been united before. He could alter himself to fit into any groove, to become the ultimate being from every prophesy.

L personally, remembering every passage from the Bible that he'd read as a child growing up in a Catholic orphanage, thought that Kira better fitted the description of Antichrist. But the world had somehow blinded itself to that.

The world _had _been in organized chaos before Light took his self-provided throne, however; mankind had _wanted _a savior, from whatever angle it would come. Despite all sorts of bloodshed and hate in the name of independence, the world had wanted someone to follow. Was it really so surprising that they'd adhered like insects to the first miracle they found? In the end of an era, the midst of which the whole world was ready to self-destruct, Kira had stepped forth with his godly powers in exactly the moment when man had needed a God. It was poetic in a way.

Now L shut his eyes, willing the thoughts to silence. He didn't want to think about Light, about Kira or his world… he'd never be a part of it anyway. L _was _dead; had died as the captain of a small team that had almost—_almost—_stopped this.

He wondered what would have happened if he had succeeded. Without their Light to guide them, would men have finally wiped themselves out?

Both hands clasped his skull tightly, gripping handfuls of his hair as he released a growl of frustration, and began to do simple mathematic equations in his mind. Anything, think of _anything _but that. How did Light, once such a kind, brilliant child, know the intricacies involved in driving a man insane? What sort of inherent talent did he have? Why could he dominate a mind so completely? How?

He prayed to a nameless, faceless power that he would somehow witness the day Light met his justice. _Anything! _That, at least, would be worth this—_Anything!—_he'd lost his chance to destroy Kira, but someone else would have to succeed where he had failed. They must. They _must! The_ cosmos would not be so cruel as to—

.X.

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Later, at a time that the small screen indicated was close to midnight on a Tuesday—like L had any way to know, the damn thing could have been a prerecorded set—Light slammed the giant metal door open so hard that it crashed against the concrete wall with a scrape that almost produced sparks. He was a demon, and looked the part; his usually flawless hair flew in antagonized directions, plastered to his sweat-slickened forehead in delicate silk strings. He had the crushed remains of his cell phone in his left hand.

"You're here," he hissed after a moment—a long moment of just _staring _at L, bloodshot eyes wide and possessed. "You're right the fuck here."

L lowered his head, staring back at him from under the unkempt fall of his shaggy tangles. Both hands chained, covered in the scars of almost a decade of abuse; the eyes made the skin on Light's neck grow taught and a fresh sheen of cold sweat dampen his shirt. L had never seen Light afraid. Light had never seen…

"Am I?" L replied, and smiled a devil's smile.

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* * *

_I get the distinct feeling that nothing in this chapter makes any sense. This might be expected as__**I** haven't made much sense lately, but if it's true then I ask you to please bear with me and hope it doesn't last. Because it won't, probably._

_With that in mind, I have a new request. I have become remarkably paranoid about my writing in the last few days, so I would most terribly appreciate some "constructive" (if at all possible) criticism. Cuz If I'm not doing everything in my power to improve I might as well quit now, yeah?_

_As always thanks for coming this far with me. My readers are my mana of life. :)_

_And yes, I changed my penname. Been meaning to do it forever; I've been using that old one since way back when I was writing Sailor Moon fanfiction and wishing I was a girl so I could look that good in a miniskirt. Sorry if it threw anybody off. :P _


	5. Message to Ephesus

Who is like unto the beast? Who is able to make war with him?  
Revelation 13:4

**Chapter Five**

**Message to Ephesus**

.X.

Over the night, it had begun to snow. Teru had paused briefly to run his hands over his aching eyes, and stood to set the water for another pot of coffee, staring out the window as his stainless steel electric pot had hummed quietly. His apartment was on the seventh floor of a twenty-story complex; high enough to see the sky, too low to reach it. The faint flurries swirled in a delicate, erratic motion as they descended toward the city where they would meet their end. Nothing so pure survived in Tokyo.

He'd called in to work, suspecting that Kira wouldn't arrive until after he was supposed to be gone. His receptionist had sounded startled; Mikami had never missed a day in all his twelve years of prosecuting. But while he was used to grueling hours for both his own career and his work done for Kira, he wasn't used to all-nighters and wasn't interested to test his level of functioning under the circumstances.

Besides, he thought dully, returning his gaze to the sleek black laptop on his table; the punishment he might receive from his God in the morning would probably far outweigh the discomfort of a few lost hours of sleep.

Over one hundred names, all in the past year and a half. He'd placed a call to a dozen of the law enforcement offices from which the case profiles had been submitted, and discovered that none of them were on file in the original system. If the cases had not been under jurisdiction of the law, then they were surely fakes deliberately planted into Kira's Reckoning system. No technical flaw could have created such a wide array of circumstances; he'd crossed and checked and double-checked every case, and nothing about them was even remotely similar except for the mug shot.

Over one hundred names. Teru was sure he would not be forgiven for not noticing this sooner.

Sighing softly, he folded his glasses on the counter by the slowly steaming pot, grinding the heel of his palms to his temples. Frustrated with himself, he decided on tea at the last minute—the caffeine would only make him nervous. He returned to his work.

The sun was just barely beginning to skim the concrete horizon when Kira arrived, walking in without so much as a pause from the unlocked door. He also looked tired—imperceptible to anyone but Teru, who knew the face of God down to the last detail. But he actually smiled a little when Teru offered him a cup of green tea, greeting him with a slight nod. "Show me."

"Yes, Kira-sama. It's most disturbing…" he trailed off, watching Kira's face as he scanned the files on the dimly growing screen. His eyes narrowed noticeably as they darted from one line of text to another, mind clearly working itself into every groove of this unpleasantry.

The face wasn't, to be fair, a very dynamic one; the man was young, perhaps mid- to late-twenties for what the grainy mugshot resolution would show. He looked European or American, with a moderately fair complexion and dirty reddish-bronze hair usually worn in a shoulder-length ponytail. Really, he looked like any other twentysomething punk that Kira was obligated to eliminate, his nondescript criminal appearance explaining why neither of them had noticed him before.

Light sent this information tumbling through his mind, wracking his brain for what the indiscrepancies could mean. He was quite sure he'd never seen the face before. The fact that these cases were clearly a deliberate plant by an outside force… it unnerved him. It was possible that someone had simply hacked Kira's database—but for what purpose? What message did the false casefiles send?

He forwarded the files to himself, intending on analyzing them completely until an answer revealed itself. But for all his skills at logistics and finding connections that no one else could, a data breach was not his specialty. He suspected that he wouldn't be able to untangle this without help.

And he had the options, now. Once, he'd been forced to think through every possible angle alone, come to every solution. Now he had the world's finest at his command.

Muttering to himself, Light sat back against the polished leather, folding his arms across his chest. Teru watched him anxiously, fingers tight on the cooling mug of tea. Light didn't know what the man was so nervous about and lacked the energy to inquire, choosing instead to close his eyes and let his thoughts return to their normal resolution. "You've done well, Mikami. Thank you for your hard work."

Teru blinked once, and then smiled broadly and bowed his head. "All my services are yours, Kira-sama. Can you think of what this means…?"

"I don't know," Light admitted, shaking his head. To anyone else he would have carefully avoided statements such as that. "I doubt it's any simple fluke. More investigation is required." Teru nodded, eyes trained on his master's face, trying to read him. They sat in silence for a while, and Teru's eyes eventually slid to the glass doors of his veranda, watching the sun rise and stain the faint snowflakes fiery crimson. They melted in the air after only a moment of sunlight, and he found himself missing them.

He drew in a breath when he felt Kira's fingers graze his cheek, ghosting over the faint shadowy stubble that textured his skin. He felt suddenly terribly self-conscious—he should have showered before Kira arrived, been prepared to stand in the presence of God—but it evaporated just as quickly, along with all his rational thoughts, as Kira… his powerful, beautiful kami, ruler of all life and death… leaned across the space that separated them and captured Teru's lips with his own. He lingered there, not _really _kissing him, but announcing all of his dominance in that one commanding, soul-aching gesture. Teru temporarily forgot how to breathe—he thought he'd never stop being overwhelmed by this perfect being that was God made flesh.

"Mikami," he murmured against his mouth after an indeterminate amount of time, fingertips tracing the curve of his neck. Teru felt himself subconsciously moving to allow for the closeness (or perhaps Kira was controlling his body even now… what an amazing thought), mind still reeling. Kira had made love to him before, and every time—_every _time, he could only utter his thanks that he was ever found worthy. "Speak to me."

The sun breached the city skyline, painting them both a blinding white-gold. "My master," Teru breathed, feeling Kira's power invade him, caressing his mind. "You are the shining commander, the only hope for the world… without you, there is nothing. You are life and death." He'd closed his eyes, sensing rather than feeling Kira's hands steadily undoing the buttons on his shirt. "Kira… my king, my god. I worship you."

"And this?" Kira prompted, letting Mikami's shirt fall open and running a fingertip on the delicate ridge of a scar directly over his heart. A brand, marking a name, stood pale and faded against the otherwise smooth skin.

"Proof of my loyalty," Mikami whispered, "and the best part of me."

"Good," said Kira, and kissed him again.

.X.

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**L is dead. **

Roger released a long, pained breath as he reread the message for what felt like the thousandth time. It was an automated e-mail, set to broadcast in the event that 48 hours passed without either Quillish or L connecting to their personal networks. Neither of them had been active for over a week now. Roger had no doubt that both his childhood friend and the young detective had died.

Quillish had implied that the successor to the L title would be in direct danger from L's killer; when they'd received the news, Near had been offered the name. He'd refused, and given no reasoning. But he had agreed to be moved to a secure location, and was currently at the American base, preparing to continue the work of L on his own terms. Roger, left without his protégé to train, felt Quillish's loss most acutely.

The loss of Near, however, caused other tempers to rise.

"Old man!" Mello shouted, kicking in his door for the fourth time that day. "How much longer are you gonna fuck with me?"

"Any damage sustained to my office will be repaired by you, boy," said Roger calmly, folding his cell phone and returning to the stack of papers on his desk. Mello thundered across the room, slamming both gloved hands on the polished oak.

"I just got off the phone with Gevanni. You _lied _to me." Roger raised his eyes to stare at the teenager dully over his oval glasses, folding his thin fingers on the desk. "You said that Near had been accepted as the new L!"

"He was. The council was unanimous."

"He _isn't _L."

"He did not accept the title as of yet." Roger shook his head, knowing that no amount of reasoning would calm the boy. "He had his own reasons."

Mello gaped, wide little-boy eyes on a face with far too much anger for one so young. "If he didn't accept," he ground out through his teeth, "then _I _am next in line to be L."

"Doesn't work like that, child."

"Don't call me a child! I'm fifteen!" Mello threw his hands up in frustration, stalking a few feet away. "And I'm every bit as qualified as Near. More qualified."

"Mello…"

But the rage had passed, settling instead into a deadly calm. Mello's thin arms crossed over his chest, eyes stubbornly averted—he made all his stupidest decisions when he got to this phase, thought Roger with some degree of misery. And Mello didn't let him down.

"All I want to know," he said evenly, scowling, "is why that little brat would_ refuse. _Because I don't care if he succeeds L, Roger. I really don't. But _why…" _Roger said nothing, waiting for the accusations instead. He suspected he might know why Near had chosen as he did… but he'd never let Mello know of it.

Receiving no answer, Mello nodded quietly to himself. "Fine, then. If I can't win… I'm leaving Whammy's House. I'll work on my own. And _I," _he added venomously, blue eyes glittering with all his pubescent rebellion, "will be the one to catch Kira, I promise you." He turned on his heel, heading for the door, but it opened before he reached it.

The teen-turned-vigilante stopped dead as he took in the sight of the man that walked in; alarmed, Roger stood from his desk and started forward.

He was tall, perhaps mid-forties, and dripping wet—the stench of gasoline rolled off of him in waves. The man was hunched under a large black parka, bloodshot eyes darting around nervously. Everything about him shouted of danger. Mello took a step back, and Roger slid protectively in front of him. "What do you want?" He said it in his clearest authoritarian voice, the one he used with screaming eight-year-olds and, on occasion, Mello.

The intruder's eyes shot up at the address and one hand slipped out of his jacket, revealing the semi-automatic pistol he held. Security at Whammy's was minimal, and it wasn't likely that he'd needed to fire the weapon to come this far, but it still made Roger's blood freeze. _The children... _

He said nothing, only stood with pistol pointed vaguely at the floor. Presently, though, he straightened, letting the parka fall open and revealing the package strapped across his chest. Roger was a trained tactition, retired or not, and he didn't need prompting to recognize a large, mobile explosive. At the sight of his fear the man smiled, a feral, sprawling grin that only made him look all the more threatening.

"For Kira-sama," he said gutturally, a grinding voice of one who's smoked too long and screamed too much.

Whammy's House was decimated by a deranged bomber on a Saturday evening at precisely 7:25, just as it had been written in the Death Note.

.X.

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Light arrived at the office two hours after he usually did, but no one commented. Izumi had kept his coffee hot.

Perhaps it was his morning with Mikami, but he felt at ease. He kept a careful eye out in the files for a certain face, though it didn't appear again, and worked at a slightly slower pace than usual because of it. Once, he would have pushed himself to achieve the perfect number at all times, but with his role of Kira came so many responsibilities that he'd never had before. He couldn't allow himself to be placed under undue pressure, or his work would suffer.

Fortunately, he had a few separate outlets for stress relief.

He did, however, skip lunch, choosing instead to make a call to his database expert about looking into the false report. Watanabe Shiro was arguably a god among mechanics, and he had faith that he could trace the breach.

"Oh yeah… that's bizarre," Watanabe agreed, scanning over the files as he spoke. "Someone's tampering with my system, hm?"

"What can you do about it?"

"Worst case? I can at least guarantee that they're all located at a root source." The distinct sound of typing echoed through the secure phone line as he trailed off.

"I'm only interested in best case, Watanabe." Light found himself toying with an ink pen, tapping it rapidly onto the desk. "Can you do it?"

"To be honest, Kira-san," Shiro was one of the only people who addressed him so informally. "I probably _can, _but it really depends on how quiet our little mouse was when he dropped by. It took a lot of skill to hack my system in the first place. It'll take me a few days."

"You'll be compensated," said Light. "Just find the source, and I will take care of it from there. I want this dealt with."

"Naturally," Watanabe replied, becoming noticeably more enthused at the mention of his payment. Kira never let his servants go hungry. "Consider it dealt. Can I contact you?"

"You may. I'll let my screeners know."

A chuckle. "Well then… Semper fi, is it?"

Light hung up on him. Were _all _masters of their respective trades destined to be irritating by nature?

But he was put considerably at ease. Watanabe had designed and programmed the Reckoning database that he used on a daily basis, and was therefore a vital part of the new world. He could be trusted.

As he drained the cup of his second refill of bitter caffeine, Light carefully considered his options. He was certain he'd taken the right steps about the security breach; it was really a low-level threat if he thought about it objectively, just a hacker with a particularly stupid sense of humor. Everything was running smoothly. The threat to himself was virtually none. There'd barely been a hitch in any of his plans, any one!... since he'd finally, finally beaten L.

That day was the one Light looked back on when he began to feel the pressure of saving the world a little more each day. It had been _thrilling... _engaging, even terrifying at times, but his game with L couldn't have come to a more satisfying conclusion. His face then wasn't even comparable to the one when Light had shown him the security footage of the bomber at Whammy's House.

And he deserved anything Light could throw at him, the cocky little bastard. The way he still called him "Yagami-kun," still spoke civilly even when his eyes burned with hatred; even beaten and chained, he still thought he could play the martyr. Light loved it.

He was still smiling faintly, remembering the day, when the small cell phone-turned-organizer that he'd taken out and placed on his desk blinked silently. It was his personal line, fully screened and highly secured, so he assumed it was either his security with some meaningless update, or Watanabe exercising his new phone freedom. In which case Light was likely to fire him.

"Yagami," he said by way of answer. He'd tried answering with "Kira," once, but it had almost made him laugh and left him feeling slightly delirious for the rest of the day.

There came the low buzzing sound of a satellite, untraceable line. The FBI used that sort of communication.

"Good afternoon, Kira," said a mechanized voice that reverberated in the receiver and triggered a strange electric impulse at the base of his skull. "I am L."

Light actively felt himself freeze.

But it passed after a moment, though when his pulse started again, it was at a considerably speedier pace. He forced a smirk.

"Is that so," he drawled, leaning back in his chair to motion to Izumi. She raised an eyebrow but nodded, and prepared to trace the call.

"Yes. And please do not trouble yourself; no technology you possess will be able to trace me."

"Oh, I wouldn't presume." He'd calmed by now, logical thoughts beginning to point out the utter absurdity of someone claiming to be L, who'd been dead in the eyes of the world for years. "To what do I owe the pleasure, then?"

There was a moment of silence, which only strengthened his rational resolve. "I thought you would appreciate a rough timeline as to my actions. I intend to keep my promise to you, Kira."

"Promise?" He watched Izumi carefully. Her brow was furrowed, and she pressed a call button for backup. But she hadn't exactly been hired for her technical prowess. "Oh... do you mean the one where you'll be killing me?" The one which, ironically enough, the entire coast of Japan had heard, all potential imposters included?

"Yes. I am prepared," added "L" as the buzzing of the line intensified for a moment, "to prove my identity to you. I am the L that you claim to have killed in October of 2003."

"Really," he said, suddenly grinning as he imagined the look on L's face when he told him that some poor fool was trying to carry on the precious name. How sweet. "I'm interested to hear that."

"You and I first made contact at To-Oh University, in the freshman exam room. I sat three rows behind you," said the metal tones smoothly. "The next time was at the entrance ceremony, at which time I introduced myself to you as L."

"Indeed you did," said Light, watching a small team of engineers gather at the call station across the room. He barely cared if they succeeded or not; he wasn't interested in fakes and imposters. "As anyone present, not to mention the school record, could have verified."

"I am not finished. The next week, we engaged in a tennis match consisting of one set. I made the first point, but you won the match, six to four. This disproved a statement that I made as we played--"

"He who strikes first wins." Light whispered the words along with the voice.

"That was also the day I told you that I suspected you of being Kira."

"Enough," said Light, feeling his brow deepen. "None of that is proof." The mechanics at the call center were trying to get his attention. He ignored them.

"Very well. I will move on to the time that you and I were confined together, with only the shinigami named Rem able to spy on us."

At this, Light's mouth dried. The only people who would possibly know about Rem were long dead... except for...

"We were connected at the wrist for a period of four months. During this time, you were never out of my sight for longer than it took to change your clothes. The shower in our suite was bi-cubicled, though you were still very displeased at the thought of bathing so close to me."

Light opened an IM on his desktop and sent it to the call center; if they didn't have this call traced by its conclusion, they were all fired. A new flurry of movement stirred the commune.

"On the sixteenth of July, a Saturday, the rest of the investigations team had been given the afternoon off. You and I had a brief argument about dessert foods. You called my eating routine a name that I found most amusing. "Icky" I believe it was."

"There was a question," said Light in his most authoritarian voice, insistent on sounding less convinced than he was. This was _absurd... _he knew damned well where L, the world's only L, was, and it wasn't anywhere he had access to voice alteration devices. "You asked me twice, both very late at night. What was the question?"

"That is most simple, Yagami-kun," and the pet name made his fingers grip the edge of his desk so hard that he felt its wooden insides begin to splinter and break. "I asked you if you thought the one we called Kira was an evil person. Both times your answer was yes." A brief pause in which Light could only imagine L... his L... placing a finger delicately to his lips, teeth grazing on the nail. "But we both knew that you were lying."

Enough. "The security tapes," he said even before he really thought of it. "Anyone with the security tapes of L's headquarters would know all of this."

"The tapes were digitally erased by Watari the moment before he died, as you yourself double-checked after my alleged death."

Enough! "Enough. What do you hope to gain by trying to convince me that you're L?"

There was a moment of silence. Light's teeth ground together painfully, and his heart was thumping wildly in his chest. _Impossible. _But by all gods, shinigami or not— it _felt _like him. The speech pattern beneath the familiar false voice, the peculiar humor that he'd always used to entertain himself while talking to lesser mortals— but L was...!

"Things are not as they were," said the machine. "Kira has obtained his dream, and he lives in the open. It is only appropriate that L should neither run nor hide."

"Then show yourself," Light growled.

"I intend to. Prepare yourself, Kira. Very soon I will sentence you to death."

And then he was gone, with only the shrill tone of the satellite ringing on the line. Light didn't move for a long moment. When he did, it was only the slow, almost imperceptible tightening of his fingers on the cell phone as he rose from his seat.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

"You're here. You're right the fuck here," he heard himself say, as if in disbelief— but of course he was bloody well there, there was no way for L to escape without removing both his arms and knocking down four feet of reinforced steel.

L looked at him with those all-seeing eyes. "Am I?" he said, and the little bastard actually _smirked _at him, clearly enjoying the rare sight of Yagami Light distressed.

With a growl Light stormed across the room, dropping the ruined cell phone in order to grab L by the throat and haul him upright. "What did you _do?" _he hissed.

He choked a little, but L kept his eyes stubbornly on Light's furious face with that bare hint of a smile in them. "I've done… all kinds of things in… kk… my life, Yagami-kun, would you like me to begin with—" Light dropped him jarringly back into the chair before he committed his first unplanned act of murder. He _knew; _L had to know who was behind the imposter that had contacted him, and Light was most interested in finding out. But if L was going to fucking _smirk _at him, he'd deal with his problems one at a time.

He stepped around L and tore the first drawer of the tiny desk literally off its hinges. He was literally seeing red, driven on perhaps by the fact that he hadn't muted the television sets when he'd arrived, and the cacophony of voices cheered him faithfully on. If he didn't listen, the only word that he could really catch in the whirlwind of sound was the name—his name, the name humanity had given its god. This, more than anything, was probably what drove him to clasp the brand—all his power was in his _name. _If L surrendered to that, then…

But he didn't know _what _happened, sometime between flicking the switch to heat the metal and turning to face its intended target, couldn't decipher the meaning of the sudden whisper of pain that ghosted across his skin. The first impact was a hard-heeled kick directly to the side of his head, knocking him solidly to the concrete, and then L—fragile, starved, imprisoned L—had the full length of a chain around his shoulders and both knees in his back and a three-inch shard of fucking _glass _at his throat. Where in the hell had he gotten _glass? _How, when Light was so careful, so meticulous about—

And even as his chin ground painfully into the cement floor he felt his eyes widen as the remembered the damned _cup. _L hadn't finished his milk, and he hadn't wanted the little fuck to die of thirst—so he'd been waiting _all that time _until Light dropped his guard, and now—

"Even Kira makes mistakes," L hissed into his ear, grinding his knees into Light's spine. From his minimal view, Light saw a pale-fingered hand reach across the floor and curl around the discarded rod that had clattered to the ground. He fought for breath, trying to roll the ex-detective off of him even as his throat worked around the name.

"L—"

"Yes," said L, almost softly, and he could hear the grim smile. "I think that will do quite nicely."

The hot end of the brand slammed onto the floor behind him, sending a shower of sparks toward his face as it shattered once, twice, three times; until only a fragment of glowing metal remained on the rod, the "I" of KIRA. L shifted him, let go of the glass—and pushed the white-hot metal into Light's back, searing through his shirt and blackening the skin beneath.

He didn't have time to stop the hoarse scream that bubbled from his throat as his entire back ignited with white blistering pain, erasing every rational thought he'd ever had. L lifted the brand only to slam it back down again: a fresh storm of agony. It felt like hours of endless, endless _pain—_ and then the rod clattered to the concrete and the pressure was gone.

Light drew a breath… two… gasp and pant and _listen to the voices _and then…

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

He didn't know if he'd killed him, and he didn't really give a damn, but he was at least certain that rarely had a human being been beaten the way Light had beaten L, vision overclouded with crimson and the scent of his own flesh burning.

Later, when he'd hauled himself up the stairs and left a trail of blood on the way to his bathroom and caught his breath crouched in front of the mirror, Light treated his wound. But not before he spent a long, breathless hour staring at the two lines; uneven, out of proportion, forming the shape of a single letter permanently stained onto the blade of his left shoulder.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

* * *

_-stops to catch his breath-_

_This chapter scares me. o.o_

_Anyway, I'll leave all the "OMGZ WTFQ L WENT ALL KILL BILL ON HIS ASSoneoneone" to you guys, I have thanks to give. Because the feedback on the last chapter gave me a_ lot _to think about, and I adore each and every one of you for the kind words and advice... and while I realize, most wholeheartedly, that I'm pretty much a n00b at this whole "write like you mean it" thing, I'm really growing to like this thoroughly twisted little brainchild o' mine, and I hope with all my demented little heart that I don't let you down. This means a lot to me, possibly more than it by right should... but still, I promise to do my best. :)_

_Seeya next time around._


	6. All Hallows

Do not gloat over me, my enemy! Though I have fallen, I will rise. Though I sit in darkness, a light will come to guide me.

Micah 7:8

**Chapter Six**

**All Hallows**

.X.

Light stayed gone for over a week, though twice L woke to find a cold platter of food beside his chair. He'd sniffed at them, feeling extremely dubious as to whether Light was really feeling particularly generous after L had gone and broken his favorite toy; they could well have been his last meals. He thought if the almighty Kira was going to kill him, he'd do it by starvation—too proud to use the Death Note, and too afraid to finally get blood on his hands.

L gazed absently at the screen directly above him as it played a most thoroughly unoriginal semi-erotic movie. He couldn't make out the audio, but he could tell by looking that the characters lacked depth in any form, and the conflict around which the story revolved was mediocre at best.

He smiled faintly to himself.

He wasn't badly hurt—nowhere near as badly as Light had _intended _to hurt him at least. Pain was not something to which Yagami Light was accustomed in the least; it had made him sloppy and dulled his perception, caused his usually precise and methodical actions to visibly skew. Their encounter had been intense, terrifying—and infinitesimally revealing. He'd gotten a whole handful of new weaknesses upon which to play, only at the cost of what felt like a cracked rib and a sprained wrist.

Soon, he mused, watching a sudden but predictable scene in which the main characters of the movie shared a kiss in the rain, Light would shimmer back into that doorway. And bring along something to bash his head in with, no doubt.

Really, L hadn't felt better in a long, long time.

Nevertheless, there were things to consider. Light had certainly seemed upset, even before L pulled his stunt—dare he recall fear in the striking caramel eyes? That _would _be interesting. "_You're here." _Perhaps he was experiencing delusions? If his mind had projected an image of L walking around freely, it would have a comparable effect. And "_what did you do?" _

While the idea made him smile (quickly replaced by a grimace as he lifted his sheet-metal arms to lay them behind his head, almost _hearing _them whimper in protest) it also posed several potential problems. If Light had gone insane… well, more visibly so… L's safety went down by several notches. And while he acknowledged that his current situation would have mirrored death, to some, L was not ready to die just yet. Particularly at the hands of a deranged Yagami Light.

On the other hand, if delusions were not to blame… could something have gone wrong in the picture-perfect clockwork tyranny that was Kira's kingdom? What, to rattle him so badly?

He suspected he'd never figure out the answers with the scarce clues that he had, but that didn't mean he couldn't think about it. Thinking, after all, was something he had a lot of leisure to do.

Running his fingers over his sprained wrist, L let his thoughts wander. A little bit of exercise had done wonders for his mind, and he didn't have to actively force thoughts of Light out of his head now that an image would come that wasn't Kira's harsh maniacal laugh. It had been good, he concluded, to remind himself that Light was human, could feel pain and humiliation just as well as L himself could. He would focus singularly on that fact from now on; perhaps it would help him keep his sanity.

But... did that mean that, without realizing it, he'd really begun to think of Light as some sort of otherworldly entity? He knew for a fact that Yagami Light was not a god, nor anything remotely resembling one... had his captor's psychological tampering affected him to such a degree? It wasn't a stretch to imagine... even if the only inhuman trait that Light had ever shown him was his incredible capacity for cruelty. But L had faced some of the world's most vicious murderers (most that had been killed by the Kira regime), and knew that cruelty in and of itself was foremost a human design. It manifested even in small children, where instincts were purest: humans were a vile, self-serving lot, and they never ran out of reasons for wounding one another.

He shut his eyes, remembering the thought he'd had many times since he'd discovered the existence of the Death Note... there could potentially be a Kira in everyone. If it had been himself and not Light who'd been presented with the book, he was... mostly confident in his abilities to resist it. He liked to think that he would have destroyed it upon confirming its powers. But there was no realistic way to deny his own temptation. He'd been tempted with Rem's book, remembered holding it in his hands and watching the demon eyes of his dearest friend and most brutal enemy, _knowing _that he held the power to execute Kira without any more damned lies. It would have been so incredibly simple. He'd wanted it, terribly.

And Light had watched his every struggle with a smile; seeing the inner conflict and confident in his own ability to survive through L's moral dilemma. L had watched Light watching him and felt his strengths fall away from him, frustration and anger running in a never-ending cycle through his mind, as it was all he could do just to maintain his professional aura.

But L, all his life, had been two things reliably; the first was standoffish, and the second was stubborn. The Note had remained unused, for better or for worse, ethically. He had, in a way, stood by his beliefs... but he'd also allowed things to end up as they had.

Damned if you might've, he thought absently. The movie had finally drawn its last shuddering breath, and as the credits shimmered prettily across a computer-edited backdrop, he realized with an ironic start that it had featured the obviously fading star of Hideki Ryuuga in the title role. _Well, no wonder_. L grinned.

His eyes scanned the row of screens most comfortably at his eye level, focusing arbitrarily on a fairly boring news clip concerning a downtown renovation of some convention center. It'd be a sunny day in Kira's head before L actually cared about such things, but he liked looking at Tokyo... recognizing places he'd seen, if not been, and imagining that he was free to go there if he wished. The ugly symphony of voices still chattered mercilessly around him, but it was notably more bearable tonight.

After a few moments, though, he sat up slightly, eyes zeroing in on the screen. He hadn't the faintest idea what had caused his mind to latch onto the grainy image, but now he thought he saw, in the blankly staring crowd at the center, a face that he recognized.

It was gone before he really had time to examine it, camera shifting instead to the generic face of a low-rate newscaster; L closed his eyes and willed the picture to replay itself in his memory… a sliver of dirty-blonde hair in a sea of brown, European features blending into prominent Japanese. He couldn't tell the position or even the gender of the person, but his detecting and connection-seeking mind insisted that he'd seen them somewhere, and that they had been important somehow.

The more he tried to concentrate, though, the louder the multitude of voices pressed into his thoughts. Curse Light and his foresight, he thought sourly, pulling his knees to his chin and scowling at the screens. Even the small pleasure of drawing conclusions was effectively denied him.

His heart rate had sped up perceptively, he suddenly noticed. The televisions meant he was under a constant barrage of external stimulus, which had, apparently, deadened his senses to the more familiar internal sort. L was a creature of reason, deduction and puzzles and mathematics by nature, and being denied his thoughts caused some sort of lethargic withdrawal.

That wasn't acceptable. The thought came as if from a source not his own, and he felt his eyes fall wide and sightless as the truth of it. Too long he'd fallen for Light's tricks, allowing his mind to be dominated by whatever the self-proclaimed deity threw at him.

Closing his eyes again, blocking the endless meaningless images, he resolved to strengthen his mind. He had no intention of dying here, and he'd had enough of Light's games. He'd already won one round with the mere strength of his body—with the full power of his mind set to the task, L began to think that he might have a chance to overpower Kira once and for all.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

**…. Disconnected. **

**- HXWHAM03 has signed off. **

He shut down his laptop with a vicious yawn, stretching his arms over his head and listening to them crack. It was late—early, rather—and while he wasn't in the least bit tired, he knew Near would have his head if he woke tomorrow so much as bleary-eyed. And he'd have the damn cat on his side, no less.

Rolling over onto his back and hanging upside-down off his side of the bed, Matt prodded the steadily-breathing blonde slumped over on his desk. "Oy," he murmured quietly. "Won't get much work done like that."

Shifting a little, Mello responded with a sleepy little sigh that made his partner's insides go squishy. Oh, but Mello _was _so much more bearable when he was asleep.

Much more bearable. Enjoyable, in fact. Possibly even downright cute. Matt grinned, hauling his lower half into a feasible position. He might very well earn himself a shiner by attempting to move the overly-irritable man, but it was far preferable to a morning Mello with an aching back.

"Mello," he whispered, leaning over to breathe the name in Mello's un-scarred ear. "We've had a break. The team is moving out." Not so much as a twitch. That was good; meant he'd be less likely to get beat up for this. He slipped an arm around Mello's shoulders, hoisting him carefully out of his seat with one hand and shutting down the desktop with the other. The blonde practically defined workaholic some nights…

It took a bit of maneuvering, but when he finally had Mello safely on the bed, he got to enjoy watching him curl into a protective ball and fist his hands into the sheets. He considered simply crawling in and cuddling his sleeping partner to death then and there, but decided that the urge to relieve himself and move around a bit was a stronger one.

A few minutes and a cigarette later, he wandered into the kitchen to find Omit scooping a giant pile of toothpicks into the small trash can. He raised an eyebrow and she gave him a look that told him not to comment, though he guessed that Near had once again left a large and intricately-built toothpick-creation on the table to be presently knocked over by an unsuspecting housemate. Biting on a grin, he went to rummage in the fridge.

"We're out of beer," said Omit just as he began to reach for the tray, causing his hand to drop dejectedly.

"We're _always _out of beer. Why is that?"

She shrugged, finishing with the Ruins of the Once-Mighty Toothpick Palace and plopping down at the table, crimson-painted nails tapping on what was clearly the last can. "If I had to guess, I'd say it was almost entirely due to you and me. But more you than me."

"Now _that's _untrue," he said, though it wasn't, leaning over to snatch the drink from within her claws and treating himself to a long draught before passing it back. Omit shook her head in mock disappointment.

"Lush," she commented, before draining the rest of the contents in one masterful stroke.

Omit was the newest member of their makeshift little team, her alias being the screenname she'd been using in the chat room Matt had found her in. He'd made a single offhand comment at the time that neither of them remembered now, and she had most brutally and efficiently hacked their makeshift but heavily guarded headquarters and shut them all down for a month. Impressed and more than a little intimidated by her skills, he'd introduced her to his housemates. When even Near appeared to be satisfied with her intellect, she'd sort of been unofficially invited into the "investigation" as it were.

Her downtown apartment now doubled as their headquarters. At nineteen, she was the second youngest only to Near.

And she could out-drink Matt, which was just cool. Mello didn't like her much… but Mello didn't like much of anything, preferring anger and bitterness to civility.

"Where's Near?"

"Dunno. He left a couple of hours ago." Omit slumped slightly, fingers raking through her short spikes—currently dyed an outrageous bubblegum pink—and tossed the can into the trash where it rattled on the toothpicks.

Matt blinked. "Near? Going places? At," he checked, "four-thirty in the morning? What'd I miss?"

"Same thing I did, I guess. He was with Gevanni, though, so either it's work-related or the kid's finally hit puberty…"

He snorted, leaning against the counter and stretching his arms. The thought of Near… it was just no. "Did he actually put clothes on?"

Omit subconsciously mimicked the action, bracelets and bangles jingling slightly. "I don't think so. Pajamas as per usual."

"Then it was work-related," he concluded, nodding. Near knew that one didn't have to look good to be smart for a living.

"Maybe. You'd think he'd let us in on it, though."

"You haven't known him long enough." She smiled ruefully at that. "So," he added, though loathe to bring it up, "we find anything?"

She shook her head, crossing both arms on the table. "Nothing on my end. He makes it _look _like a normal house, but Kira's place is locked down tighter than the Soviet Union. Same with the office. How 'bout you?"

"Maybe." He shrugged, tilting his head to the side. "I met a kid on a U.S. hacker server whose father works as a security guard in one of the sub-units of Kira's Tokyo HQ. If he's close enough to the main office, I might be able to go through him. Seems a little sketchy though."

"Mm. Near's got us all running circles around this anyway." She heaved a sigh, laying her head on her arms. Omit wore her eyeliner or mascara or whatever in a way that it was constantly smudged, creating a thick black ring around her pale hazel eyes. "How about Mello? He look any cheerier?"

"Passed out at the computer," said Matt, "like usual. I doubt there was anything groundbreaking."

Omit nodded, gracing herself with a few moments of eyes-closed silence before hauling herself out of the kitchen chair, swaying slightly. "Well, I'm gonna go pass out somewhere. Wake me up before Near does," she added, clearly recalling the time all three of them had tanked on the beat-up couch together and only been brought to consciousness by a death-faced albino with a water hose, "_please." _

"Likewise. G'night."

He hung around for a moment after she stumbled awkwardly down the opposite hall, but failed to come up with anything with which to occupy himself other than sleep. Padding back to his room, he glanced through the crack in the door to make sure his bedmate was safely asleep. Burrowing into the thick comforter was an acrobatic act in and of itself, every jostle given to Mello causing him to freeze briefly.

But he still chanced it, after he'd gotten himself situated, to gently brush a few blonde strands from the left side of Mello's face, ever so faintly tracing over the tender pinkish burn. And then an ever greater risk leaning over to press a gentle kiss to Mello's forehead, scars and all.

Then he rolled the opposite direction, burrowing into the blankets as far as he could go and still be able to breathe. Matt hated sleeping. Damn Near and his stupid anti-nocturnal ways anyhow.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

October thirty-first of 2003 was a dismal day: gray and drizzling outside, stonily silent inside. L gratified himself with a long moment of staring outside before he entered the windowless living-area in which the team generally pursued their respective investigations. He stood in front of the small pane of glass, arms crossed over his chest—standing straight, something he rarely felt comfortable doing.

Even now, with the closest human body a good ten metres away, he felt ill at ease. Few realized it—Watari, of course, and probably Light—that his slouched posture was a defense mechanism, how he stood on the balls of his feet to allow immediate takeoff. His muscles were constantly coiled, ready at any moment to run, or fight, for his life. Shoes slowed him down, as did restricting clothing, so he did not wear them. His hair lay in thick tangles over his face, shielding what he looked like. Both his height and build were impossible to discern.

L hadn't always been the world's three greatest detectives, but he'd always worked to get there, and that had made him enemies. He walked through them like some would walk through rain. Stepping outside, for L, was an adrenaline-filled, heart-pounding ordeal, and he passed it all off with a simple curl of the shoulders, hands in his pockets—one curled around his cell phone, and the other around a switchblade.

He was, perhaps, paranoid. But he was also alive, against all odds, emerging from every dirty deed with a stronger will to live.

Watching the stormy clouds looming despicably over the Tokyo horizon, L found himself pondering life. The day was drifting into night, and… rainclouds or no… many a parent would find themselves hauled around by their carefully made-up children tonight, celebrating a holiday that had no real meaning to any of them. A social obligation, like most events; a borrowing of an idea from another culture and acting out a routine, lives judged by calendars. Dates, names, faces. The world was shining bright.

He shook himself, grasping hold of his thoughts and steering them. L could not afford to think abstractly.

But why not, exactly? For all his care, all his tricks and defenses and lust for staying alive, he was facing a death now that came from nowhere and everywhere—could strike from within, silent and brutal. L was frightened often, but his fear manifested itself in a different manner than it did for other people. It made him think more profoundly, come to conclusions that he wouldn't have, otherwise—because when it came to fear, it was think or die. His mind was his sword and shield. No one else would protect him.

But this… this otherworldly evil that he found in Kira, in the Death Notes, in the hulking white creature that could be nothing other than a god of death… in this, L was so afraid that it went beyond being afraid. He was so terrified of death by Kira that he'd begun to embrace it… which was all he could find in his search to discover why he had not yet convicted Yagami Light.

He had his evidence. If he ordered a search of Light's home, he knew—_knew, _he'd gone beyond suspecting—that he would find another killing book, either in his hands or in the hands of Amane Misa. The pieces fit together so intricately that it was almost sickening. But then this entire case was absurd from the beginning. Notebooks that could cause a man to die didn't exist; L knew that. But he still had one in the vault upstairs. Thousands of people were dead because someone had lived on borrowed time and power, believing they could convert evil into good.

L suspected that he would not live to see the end of Kira. He doubted that he would live out the year, and all because Kira was hovering somewhere in his building, in his home, Kira had all the passcodes that would take him to where L was and even if he didn't… Kira could kill him without so much as looking at him.

He wondered mildly if Light had known his name from the very beginning, and had only left him alive to watch him suffer. It seemed like something that Light would do.

As the cold mist stained a swirling pattern on the glass outside, L traced his fingers over the pale inside of his wrist, where the chain had once lay.

Halloween was an ugly thing, celebrating horror in the guise of its milder cousin, fear. Its origins were pure, and had evolved into a gruesome idea, which had in turn degenerated into a harmless children's toy.

Innocent to evil and back again, until the very foundations were a confused, twisted mix of gray.

L released a long breath, leaning forward to let his forehead touch the icy glass, creating a circle of steam beneath his mouth.

"Ryuuzaki," said a quiet voice behind him, and he fought the impulse to jump and hunch down. He was in no more danger now than he had been before.

"Yes," he replied evenly, eyes closed, speaking to the window, or the world outside. "Yagami-kun, what is it."

There was a moment of silence. His mind helpfully supplied him with the images, knowing how Light thought, by now, and certainly knowing the motions he went through: he felt the boy look at him in false concern, gauging his temperament. He saw the beautiful face… perfectly crafted, but fluid like water… melt into a false expression of tentative friendliness. And through it all he saw the eyes—liquid beauty, chocolate-syrup eyes, containing so much malice that it froze the mind; forever laughing eyes that betrayed the boy's every lie. To L, at least.

"It's getting late," said Light, taking a few steps into the room and making a show of looking around, pretending to miss the place that he'd lived in until recently. "Most of the team went home when you didn't show, but my father is still downstairs."

L nodded, not caring in the least. He had other people to give him status reports. "I see."

"Are you all right?" Oh, the boy was slipping… that came a little too quickly to be genuine.

"Yes. A little tired, perhaps." He turned, subconsciously slipping his hands into his pockets and feeling his body curl into its conditioned stance. His back pressed into the icy glass as he met Light's eyes—not at all fearlessly, but convincing enough to feel like it. "Did you need something?"

Annoyed, Light almost let the mask slip. But he wouldn't be done in that easily. "Not really," he replied at length, leaning a little on the wooden footboard of the queen-sized bed. "You've seemed a little stressed lately. Is there anything I can do?"

If there were gods of death, L found himself wondering, were there gods of other things, too? Mercy, perhaps? Cruelty? Love? "Yagami-kun has placed all of his efforts toward this case. That is all I could ask." It was as if they had both surrendered to their personal machines, acting out their prerecorded programs by rote. But the only other option was system overload; total meltdown.

"Ryuuzaki…" Light took a step toward him, beguilingly concerned. "Don't do that. You've been upset ever since Higuchi died. Can't you talk to me?"

"Of course not," L snapped. "Case data is not permitted to be discussed outside of a controlled setting. Yagami-kun knows this."

Light frowned, but expertly backed off. He glanced around the room, repeating his earlier performance.

"I've kind of missed living here with you," he said with a vague, awkward smile. "You get used to something and all. But," a chuckle, "it's been nice sleeping through the night."

L sighed, incredibly glad that Light's sleeping routine had at last been remedied, but not particularly in the mood to dance the dance tonight. "Is your father waiting for you?"

A slight flicker of the eyes, a faint curl of the lips. Once, L hadn't been able to see any indication that Light was feeling anything beneath the surface. Now the signs were so clear he couldn't imagine that they hadn't been there before. But they must have been… he'd simply been blind. "No… he's just clearing out some files on his desktop. Yotsuba stuff. He'll leave when he's done. I thought I'd sleep here tonight, if that's okay."

Of course. "Of course," he muttered, turning away. The sun had set sometime when he hadn't been watching, leaving only the dirty red glow of the city lights. Halloween… violent crime would rise by almost twelve percent tonight. Anyone could get away with anything with their faces hidden to the world. L was testimony to that.

Apparently done with being ignored, Light slid up beside him, one shoulder to the wall, gazing out the window in companionable silence. L looked at him, unsure whether the sudden urge inside him was to move closer or to run away.

"It's going to be a cold winter." Light's face looked nothing less than artistic, shimmering and streaked by the synthetic Tokyo glow. L couldn't find the will to look away.

"Light…?"

Subtle raising of eyes. "Hmm?"

"Is Kira evil for what he has done?"

The glass of the window was proof, but it didn't block sound. A siren screamed below them, echoed by another; a morbid symphony of a city devoured, if only for a night, by fear.

"I think," said Light, eyes trained on the sky, "that whoever Kira is, however he found a Death Note… to kill so many people, he must have hurt even more. Especially the people around him… the people he loved." A pause. "And… in some ways, I think that's even more despicable than murder. For that, Kira is evil."

L left, stepping back from the window as if the ice had suddenly become fire. He put on the ruse of doing something elsewhere, though even he wasn't sure what. He could not listen to Light speak as if he were human, with a heart and a soul and the ability to love. It would break him.

Light watched him, unreadable eyes with so much to say. A long, silent moment passed.

"Guess I'll go back to my room," he murmured quietly, pushing off from the wall. "See you tomorrow."

L nodded but said nothing, curling up near the head of his bed that had once been theirs, eyes firmly on the floor. Light lingered near the door before he left.

"Happy Halloween, for what it's worth," he said wryly, clearly feeling the same about the holiday.

"Thank you. To you as well."

Smiling, Light tossed a small cloth package onto the mattress; the label gave it away as a box of candy corn. L glanced up, meeting his eyes with what he hoped was gratitude or kindness instead of any of the other emotions he felt when he looked at Light…

"And happy birthday, L."

He left, the moonlight-silver body of Rem hovering after him. L, against his better judgment, glanced back out the window: it would start to rain, soon, but he doubted that would do much to drown out the shrill siren scream.

.X.

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* * *

_This chapter is dedicated to Sophabelle, in hopes that her University extensions didn't turn out too badly. ;D_

_I apologize for the utter lack of action in this chapter, but sometimes you just gotta set the mood, y'know? Thanks to all my readers once again; I'm glad the last chapter went over as well as it did. I'm not very good at writing... intense scenes. I actually start to shake a little. But that particular scene was actually the baby bunny that evolved into this fic, so it's good that it turned out well. _

_Here's to hitting 80 reviews! Let's see if we can't break a hundred this time... ;)_


	7. South Southeast

And our name shall be forgotten in time, and no man shall have our works in remembrance, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist, that is driven away with the beams of the sun, and overcome with the heat thereof. For our time is a very shadow that passeth away; and after our end there is no returning: for it is fast sealed, so that no man cometh again.

Apocrypha, Book of Wisdom 2:4-5

**Chapter Seven**

**South-Southeast**

.X.

Twice, as he walked, Light caught his right hand holding his left shoulder, fingertips grazing the tip of the still-burning scar on his back. Twice he wrenched it away so hard the joints in his elbow cracked, stuffing both hands in the pockets of his jacket and hunching a trace more moodily.

It was probably a lot more foolish than it felt to be outside, alone and without protection. The whole world knew he was Kira, after all. But he wanted to walk. It was snowing fairly bitterly, so the streets were, for the most part, bare; he had his collar up and the brim of his hat down, menacing enough so that the occasional stranded passerby could sense the danger in him and keep out of his way, discreet enough so as not to be approached by any idiots looking for trouble.

Not, precisely, that those were common to be found anymore. Assaults, particularly in the daytime, no matter how deserted it was, were practically nonexistent in Japan. Most crimes that Kira found himself judging these days were domestic; crimes of passion. These, while usually the more brutal, were the crimes that he'd expected from the beginning to be the most difficult to eradicate. It was safe to assume that violence would never fully be purged from this generation: humans mimicked what they'd always seen, after all. Their children, perhaps, or their children's children would be the first truly peaceful people, under their leader's guidance.

But that was for the future. Today, Light was in the prime of his youth and already leading the globe towards Eden; he most literally had the weight of the world on his shoulders, and he could not—despite his conduct over the past six days, involving the termination of many a career in his office—be agitated.

This, however, could not and would never change the fact that, while a god in the eyes of the world, Light was still human with a human capacity for anger. And while he knew that he was unmatched in detaching his emotions from his work ethic, he also knew when to admit that a limit had been reached.

This, obviously, was such an instance.

Six days and he hadn't seen L—hadn't verified that he was alive from the effects of his stupid escapade and hadn't bothered to feed him, honestly not trusting himself not to kick the bastard's chest in until the life was crushed from within it. And that, frankly, was not a death that Lawliet deserved—he would die slowly, now, every _microbody _within him crying out in agony. Images of the pale spider body broken on the concrete kept rotating through Light's mind on a red haze. L would die mercilessly, and soon.

Releasing a steamy breath that lied about his level of calm, Light kicked the snow off his boots as he leaned against the steps to a mountainous suburban home. It took a keycard entry to open the ornate iron gates, and he was met at the door by a surprised-looking butler who bowed deeply and ushered him inside.

"—most unexpected, my lord, the mistress didn't inform—far too cold out there, let me take your—ah," he was quite young for someone in such a high position, really, but wisely stopped his babbling at Light's pointed eyebrow-raise. "Of course, I will let her know right away. Um…" and he was gone like a shot. No one dawdled when in the same room with Kira.

Chuckling mildly, Light hung his own coat and made his way into the parlor room to wait. It was amazing how much more efficient people became when placed in direct contact with the people who paid their salaries.

"_Light_!" was the only warning he received before being placed on the better end of a chokehold hug and obtaining a lapful of female.

All response was efficiently squeezed out of him for several seconds. "Hey there, little sis," he managed when Sayu released him, absolutely vibrating with pleasure.

Sayu was twenty-one now, and the absolute image of beauty. Their family had been blessed with looks on top of brains both in generous portions, and Light was proud of the woman his sister had become. Though not politically-minded enough to be of much aid in the Kira regime, she was sharp and supportive, more than worthy of being his sibling. She did, however, live under another name to avoid needless publicity, which was understandable.

She gave him a critical once-over as she launched into chattering. "What are you doing here? You could have called, you know… oh my god, it's got to be freezing out there! You're dripping wet—did you seriously walk here? Are you insane?! You're going to get yourself assassinated or pneumonia or something else embarrassing, here—" she crossed the room to find a thick wool blanket, forcibly draping it over his shoulders before he had time to protest.

Watching her mother him had a tangible effect. He grinned at her ceaseless chatter, and felt himself relax slowly by degrees. It had been a most unexpected turnabout, but sometime over the last few years, he'd begun to need his only remaining family more than he'd ever thought he would.

Later, after she'd warmed him up to a satisfactory level and sent the butler for hot chocolate or something equally cliché, the whirlwind actually paused long enough for the most powerful man in the world to get a word in edgewise. "You look like you're doing well."

Sayu laughed. "Jeez, Light… well's an understatement. You really went overboard here, you know," she said it as she always had, gesturing around at the home and easy living that he provided for her. Their family had never been poor, but there was no doubt that she'd never expected, as a child, to have a small squadron of personal servants at her beckoning. Her house was expansive without being overwhelmingly massive (like his sometimes was) and tastefully decorated, though he noticed that every time he visited, she'd noticeably changed the look and feel of the place.

He just smiled. "How's Hasayama?"

"Grouchy as usual. He's at work today," she said. Her boyfriend was… less than enthusiastic about living with Kira's sister, and went out of his way _not _to touch the money that Light provided for him. Light, personally, wouldn't have had it any other way; any other man he would suspect of simply using Sayu to live free and eat well. Hasayama, while admittedly stubborn, was a good man. "Oh, you should have heard him after you left last time, Light—he kept…"

He didn't doubt that the pair loved each other well enough… but he also knew from security reports that his sister kept a small photo of Touta Matsuda in the drawer under her desk.

Listening to his sister talk about her life had an almost Zen effect on him. She worked part time as a fashion consultant, more to avoid boredom than anything else, and volunteered at a children's mission house in Shinjuku. He was constantly relieved that she had the tenacity to life a normal life, even with the hellish security measures that had to be taken to hide the fact that she was related to Kira. If that were ever found out, she would be targeted by extremists within an hour and would have to go into hiding for months, years—possibly forever.

Light felt his gaze drop slightly, leaning into the blanket as another faint chill ghosted over him. He would avoid that at all costs.

"And… have you heard from mother?"

Sayu paused, though she tried not to let the cheer fall from her voice. "Yes," she said, smiling into her hot chocolate. "I called her a few nights ago, actually. She's… doing okay."

Somehow, Light doubted it. Sachiko had never forgiven him, for Soichiro, for Kira, for… anything. She didn't believe in what he stood for, and hadn't quite forgiven Sayu for standing by him. But Sayu understood—she knew that their father had died a noble death, for the betterment of the world under Kira. Sachiko… was another necessary loss.

"That's good," he murmured. He had offered his mother everything he'd given Sayu, and would continue to do so though she'd never accept or even speak to him. Perhaps someday she would understand…

They fell to silence after a while, Sayu peering at him pointedly. Light didn't visit often, and she obviously suspected something to be amiss. It wasn't really, but he didn't know how to say aloud that he'd just felt like seeing her.

"Sayu..." he set his half-drained mug on the delicate-looking end table beside the loveseat. She tilted her head slightly, ready to go into caring-sibling mode at a moment's notice if necessary. He was, admittedly, a little annoyed at how easy she was to read.

"Yes?"

He folded his arms, leveling his gaze so that he looked less agitated than he felt. "Am I doing the right thing?"

There was a not-unexpected pause. He'd never asked her anything like that… never asked anyone, never showed any doubts. And despite the overwhelming sense of responsibility and power he displayed, the two of them rarely talked about his role as Kira.

Sayu set her mug down in the same fashion, folding her legs beneath her. She looked equal parts uncomfortable and contemplative, and he wondered if she'd ever really thought about it.

"I think you are," was the eventual response. "I didn't at first. When you first told us it had been you all along, I didn't know what to think. It was scary," she admitted. And it had been—Sachiko had gone into panic and rage, threatening to call the police and the media and anyone else she could think of, and Sayu had disappeared for two weeks, presumably staying with friends and adjusting to the idea that her brother was the world-renowned supernatural killer.

During that time, Light had silenced his mother. The words still kept her silent today.

"But when you think about it, no one's ever managed to do what you've done because there was no other way to do it. I know it hasn't been easy for you, Light." Her eyes softened on him, reading into him as only she could. "It must be hell, actually. But I do think you're doing the right thing. You're saving the world."

Light released a breath, smiling at her fondly. He knew all that, he _knew _he was right… but it was still good to hear her say it. "Thanks."

"Although," Sayu scooted a little closer to him, nudging his knee with a familiar grin, "I'd know for sure if I could figure out _how _you do it. You could teach me..."

He just smirked, pushing at her lightly. "That, little sister, is the world's most valuable secret. You couldn't afford it."

"Hmph. Maybe you are just an evil dictator…"

"Maybe. Want to hear my evil laugh?"

It was a good three hours later, laughing and talking about vague, unimportant things, Light decided he needed to get home and back to work. Sayu promptly called the butler to arrange a car, absolutely refusing to let him outside in the snow again.

"By the way," she said after releasing him from another breath-defying embrace, "what have you got Misa-Misa doing over there in that big house of yours? I haven't heard from her in weeks. Bring her next time, okay?"

"I will," said Light, placing a kiss on his sister's cheek. "Though I don't know when I'll be able to get away again."

She nodded with only a mild pout by comparison, drawing the blanket tighter around her shoulders as the butler opened the door for him. "I know. Just… take care of yourself."

"You too. My best to Hasayama..." he added with a faint smirk.

Sayu laughed. "Your best is a hell of a lot, Light."

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Omit's headache admittedly wasn't as vicious as she'd expected it to be, but it was still far from pleasant, and the eight-thirty sunlight creeping over her half-closed blinds was a phenomena unbidden. She grumbled, rolling over onto the side that would face her bedroom door and counted down the seconds—because it was not, unfortunately, the sunlight that had awakened her.

Four heavy bootfalls later, Mello opened the door and aimed a .25 caliber pistol at her face.

"'mornin' sunshine," she said by way of greeting, waving a little with the set of two miniature throwing knives she had positioned to fly into his guts. The two of them, and Matt, had a strange ritual in place, constantly attempting to catch each other off-guard—though she'd never realty figured out whether it was really a training exercise rather than a vicious little power play. Between the three of them, she lost more often, but she was improving.

Tucking the gun back into his belt, Mello nodded at her faintly. She chose to interpret this as commendation on an assault well avoided. "Kitchen. Near's called a meeting."

"Sure thing," she said, yawning and waving him off with one hand and stashing the blades with another. "I'm on it. Double time." He gave her a dubious glower and left, and Omit burrowed her face into the pillow. Three hours of sleep, mild hangover, grumpy Mello… yes, life was normal.

She tumbled out of bed a few seconds later—Near really would make her suffer if she made him wait too long—and chanced a look at herself in the wall mirror. Her short pink hair was a wreck, the kohl on her eyes smudged beyond repair, and the clothes she'd slept in were a wrinkled homage to the aroma of alcohol.

"Perfect," she declared, and padded out into the hall, wondering if she'd have time to eat before the numbers started flying.

As she rounded the corner from her room, a small line of sleekness grazed against her ankles. "Morning, Peruvi," she cooed to her gray tiger cat, leaning to stroke him in greeting. He was almost three years old and she'd had him since he was a kitten, which made her his rightful owner, yes… but ever since Near and his team had taken to occupying the apartment that had once been hers, Peruvi had latched onto the young genius-child with a powerful, undaunted affection rarely seen in the feline race. He adored Near, for whatever reason.

She wasn't, fortunately, the last to arrive, but it was close. Matt slid in behind her, flipping one of the kitchen chairs backward and draping himself over it. Mello looked at him with a muted distaste, eyeing the cigarette lodged behind his ear in contempt. He was forever on Matt's ass about his incessant smoking, but never said a word to Omit about hers. Omit found this very telling.

Near was hunched oddly over the far end of the table, scribbling on a sheet of well-covered paper filled with a mix of numbers, equations and doodles. He looked, as usual, closer to twelve than sixteen, defying the very reasoning behind age and intellect. Omit had always thought the kid was a damn weirdo, but she respected him hugely for that monolith mind. Still… she rested her chin on her hands, sorely hoping that this was worth not sleeping for. Peruvi leapt onto her lap and settled there.

He spoke after a few expectant moment of scribbling silence, just as she was starting to get hungry and annoyed.

"The chance has risen from fourteen to eighty-seven percent that L is alive."

Well. That would wake a fellow up.

"What?" Matt echoed her thoughts, raising an eyebrow in what resembled disbelief. Mello frowned, and Omit blinked. "How'd you come to that? I didn't even know you were investigating his death." That wasn't exactly true, as there'd always been a chance that the detective had survived and they'd discussed it before, but not in any real depth. Omit had rather forgotten about it.

Still trained on his doodles with one hand, Near distributed a copy of a data sheet to each of them, and continued as they attempted to untangle the miniscule coding. "Last night, following a lead from an informant in Japan, I was able to contact Kira directly. His behavior concerning certain subjects lead to this conclusion."

"No shit?" Omit forewent the paper in favor of staring at him owlishly. "You actually talked to him? How?"

Near ignored her, instead producing a pencil-sized digital recorder, setting it on the table and pressing play.

The sound quality was crap at best, an incessant buzzing nearly drowning out the words—but not enough so as that the conversation didn't have all three of them listening in rapt attention. They'd heard the voice of Kira on every TV and radio for miles, but it had never seemed as real as it did through that phone line.

"Jesus," Omit whistled, willing her eyes back to their normal circumference. "That's really him. How you find him, Near?"

"And why couldn't you include us in this little chat?" That was from Mello, eyes narrowing in distrust. Of all of them, he seemed to like Near the least anyway, and he didn't appreciate being excluded.

Near finally looked up, meeting Mello's eyes with his usual dull, grey-eyed gaze. "The lead was unstable. I did not expect for it to produce results, and was quite surprised when it did."

Mello scowled. "We're supposed to be a team, aren't we?" he made the word _team _sound like a curse, ice-blue eyes hard in annoyance. "Not very conducive to the solo routine. You hiding anything else from us?"

"Yes," Near deadpanned, emotionless, "lots. Mello-san might consider sanctioning his comments during informative reports, to ensure promptness and efficiency."

Mello opened his mouth, but Matt interrupted. "What about this conversation makes you think that L is alive? No one's heard from him in almost ten years…"

The blank charcoal gaze swiveled onto him. "By claiming to be the L that Yagami-san once knew, I tested his conviction that his murder of L had been successful." The pen he held was still trailing aimless lines, blacking out equations already dismissed in his mind. "As the conversation progressed, Yagami-san grew more and more disturbed. This doubt on his part indicates that he cannot be fully certain that L is dead."

He started doodling circles, eyes still trained on Matt, but clearly not seeing him. The blank, thinking-mode stare had taken a while to get used to.

"I suspect that Yagami-san attempted to kill L using the Death Note, but was never able to fully confirm his death."

"Okay," said Omit, running her fingers through her hair and tugging distractedly, "from what I know of the Death Note, you need a person's real name. Say Kira found L's name and used it, but never actually saw him die... it would naturally make him paranoid. But that qualifies as human error… surely not eighty-seven percent worth."

This process was new to her, though… evil notebooks and death gods. But watching Kira's powers firsthand all these years had opened the world's eyes to a whole to way of thinking, and Omit was only recently removed from the world.

"That is true, Omit-san," replied Near, eyes finally returning back to his scribblings. "All the details we have regarding the day L died are unclear. Naturally, L's own personal record did not extend to this event."

"Then your conclusion is based on…?"

Near blinked slowly, scratches finally ceasing as he twirled the pen deftly through his fingers. "All information on Yagami-san," he said after a while, "attests to his personality being extremely thorough. I find it difficult to believe that he would allow his murder of L to take place in a manner that he could not personally affirm its success. Therefore…"

He placed the pen down, fishing around in his pockets and retrieving a pair of dice, rolling them around in his palm. "A second option is that Yagami-san knows for a fact that L is alive."

"There's no way," came Mello's input, irritation put aside in favor of reason. "Even if he couldn't kill him at the time, with all the power that Kira has now he could have L killed even without his Death Note. He'd never let him live this long." That was certainly true… once, the name of L was so influential that he could have several major world leaders assassinated with a phone call, but his death had been made very public, and the power had fallen to the man who had beaten him.

Near let the die fall onto the table—a two and a four.

"You have each read the handwritten account of the Kira case left behind by L." Apparently, L had taken to writing a failsafe during any case in which his life was placed into direct danger, a gift of sorts to his successors. Without these records, all data in the Kira files truly would have been lost that day. "You will notice that L stressed the tenacity of Yagami-san's personality. He mentioned repeatedly that Yagami-san was highly competitive by nature and viewed L as an opponent during the course of their relationship."

He picked the dice up and rolled again, over and over. Six, ten, three, another six… "This is parallel to the observations that we have made of Kira during his political rule. I do not find it impossible that Yagami-san, upon producing the winning hand to triumph over L, would prefer his opponent alive to witness the magnitude of his defeat. It is possible that L became Yagami-san's prisoner."

There was a long moment of silence punctuated only with the small plastic clatter of the dice. Omit's stomach rumbled.

"But… all this time?" Said Matt, who'd moved the cigarette from his ear to his lips and was gnawing on it in thought. "I think it does sound possible that he'd want to mess with him a little at the time if he thought he could get away with it. But that's been… what, eight or nine years ago? The odds that he'd still be alive—"

"Are quite slim, yes. That is where we come to my impersonation over the phone last night."

He reached with one hand to replay the recording. They listened in silence.

_"Enough. What do you hope to gain by trying to convince me that you're L?" _

_"Things are not as they were. Kira has obtained his dream, and he lives in the open. It is only appropriate that L should neither run nor hide." _

_"Then show yourself." _

_"I intend to." _

Near gave no indication that he was even listening. "Regardless," he said when they'd finished, rolling and rerolling the dice with mechanical precision, "I feel that this evidence is enough to warrant further investigation. I propose that, for a time, we temporarily abandon all other case files and focus on Japan." With that, his eyes raised under the blocky strands of his stark-white hair to slide onto Mello. "Do my teammates agree?"

Mello scowled powerfully, fingers tightening on his arms where the crossed over his chest. Matt saved them all another carefully disguised bitching. "I think it's worth checking out. I don't see how, though. Everything Kira does is locked down and sealed up. We've _been _trying to infiltrate him for a while now."

"That is true," said Near as he rolled a twelve. "However, you will recall I mentioned the informant that aided me in breaching Yagami-san's personal telephone line. This informant has indicated that they will contact us again."

Omit frowned. "It could easily be a trap, Near. Kira himself could have set this up, trying to get to you."

"It is possible." He proceeded, then, to roll three twelves in a row. "But I do not think so."

She sighed, sensing she'd be getting nothing more concrete than that. "Then what do you propose we do in the meantime?"

Straightening just slightly, Near pocketed the dice and uncurled himself from the chair in what looked like a series of painful maneuvers. "We will be relocating," he said evenly, in the tone that served to remind that, though the youngest of them all, he _was _the leader of this odd little group. "I have made arrangement for a new headquarters in Japan, just south of Tokyo."

" Japan?" Despite the severity of the situation, Omit found herself grinning; she'd never been, though, like most of the world, had learned a good deal of the language in order to keep up with the Kira pandemonium.

"Yes. I wonder," he added, voice rising to just a hint above monotone, "whether Mello-san might be so kind as to allow us use of the private plane with which he has been investigating alone."

Matt raised an eyebrow in the blonde's direction, concern glittering in his features. "You've been sneaking off to Japan, Mello? Do you have any idea how damn dangerous that is?" Mello said nothing, only glared bullets at Near and gave a short, curt nod.

Near stood from his seat and smiled; if _smile _was the appropriate phrasing, it really constituted as more an intentional tightening of facial muscles, and it only served to piss Mello off further. "Very well… I should like to arrive there by tomorrow evening. Please prepare."

"Near?" Said Omit just as he was ready to turn and shuffle out. He looked at her blankly, and she raised the no-longer-comfortable gray cat from her lap. "We can take Peru, right?"

There was a faint twitch in the line of Near's lips, bordering on imperceptible but to those who knew him best. There was, obviously, no reason to bring the animal along; it could potentially cause disruption and distraction, might place the focus of the investigation in jeopardy, was all-around a bad idea…

"Yes," he said dully, and slunk from the room like an inverted shadow fleeing the dawn. Omit couldn't help but giggle, giving her now disgruntled pet a squeeze before letting him bound off. Matt shook his head at her as he lit up, and Mello simply rose to pack his things.

Tokyo it was, then.

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It was late when he got home, the sky dark and frigid on his cheeks on the short walk from the limo to the door. The heavily-armed guards at his gate looked at him blankly, confused that he hadn't bothered to tell them where he was going. They looked as if they, too, wanted to tell him the danger in his actions, but he shut them up with a look.

His mood was so far lightened, though, that he actively went searching for Misa to tell her hello. He found her in his office, examining a row of books.

"Good evening, miss," he purred, slipping his arms around her waist and nuzzling the side of her throat. She sighed and leaned back against him, hands falling from the crucifix at her throat to rest on his wrists.

"Hi," she said in response, tilting her head to let him kiss the base of her neck. He'd been rather pleasantly surprised to discover that Misa was a natural blonde; she had the aesthetic of a goddess, if not the mentality.

"I went to see Sayu," he told her, combing his fingers through her hair. "She says hello. Hasn't heard from you in a while."

"Oh… yes, I meant to call her," Misa murmured. "I've just been busy…"

He snorted inwardly—what in the world did she have to be busy with?—but nodded, turning her by the shoulders and letting her back fall against the bookshelf, surprising her with a deep, powerful kiss. She melted, arms easily sliding around his shoulders. Easy—she was _so _easy, Misa was, so easy to manipulate it was as if she had strings attached to her digits. It was convenient, it was _right _for his "queen" to worship him so completely.

But still he hated her for it.

He spoke to her, quiet little nothing-words as his fingers traced her arms, throat, cupped her breasts in a way that made her body shift like water on steel. Light couldn't hate completely—sometimes he _loved _her, loved the way she needed him, the way she sounded when he fucked her—

Mostly, though, the two extremes mixed fluidly; love and hate like twin serpents slithering in his veins, dominating over everything he felt.

He spotted Ryuk, out of the corner of his eye, poking his head and feathery torso through the wall on the opposite side of the room; the shinigami rolled his blood-crimson eyes and vanished without a word, as this was _not _a human event that entertained him very much. He chuckled in his mind as he bent to slide an arm beneath Misa, lifting her onto his chest and letting her wrap her legs around his waist, carrying her from the office. They had separate rooms, of course—he'd claimed that his late work would keep her awake, though in all honesty she probably slept less than he did.

Tonight, Misa, and everything that he loved about her. Tomorrow, he would take care of L.

If Misa noticed his scar, she never said a word.

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* * *

_Oh. My. GOD. _

_-smacks self repeatedly in face with brick- _

_I've been working on this fic for almost three months now, and I just, last night while trying to fix my dying stereo, noticed the UBERLARGE, POINTY-TOOTHED SPEAR-WIELDING PLOTHOLE jumping up and down on top of it. The case files? Y'know, the ones causing problems because we're all WHO EES DIS?? WHAT EES HIS NAME? The original plot device causing the storyline to begin to move? Mikami is the one who discovered them, remember? _

_Mikami has Shinigami eyes. _

_HOW FREAKIN' DUMB AM I? _

_Motherload of stupid. I've reworked this every which way in my head, and I can't think of any way to reconfigure the plot in order for it to make sense. **So I now submit a formal, humble apology to each and every one of you for being such a brainless wiener**. _

_I feel like discontinuing the story because that was so dumb. _

_The only bare semblance of a half-assed explanation I can come up with is that, since this fic is pretty well AU anyhow, I could hypothetically reconfigure the dynamics so that possessors of the Eyes can't see a person's name through a photograph. That, however, burns at my pride because it is so half-assed… so unless you're willing to take that as an excuse, a large gaping plothole it will remain. _

_I am so, so sorry. _

_-picks up brick, proceeds- _


	8. What Bitter Hearts and Minds

Cry "Havoc," and let slip the dogs of war.

Shakespeare

**Chapter Eight**

**What Bitter Hearts and Minds**

.X.

Drake liked Christmas despite himself, and—while he avoided calling any form of attention to himself as a general rule—found himself humming a nondescript holiday tune around his thick Cuban cigar as he walked. It was a rare treat to see snow in Japan in December, and he was enjoying it as best he could despite appearances.

He wasn't the only one. Despite Japan's total lack of relation to the holiday as a whole, he spotted Christmas trees on corners in increasing numbers as he made his way downtown. Marketing was, after all, marketing, and few things raked in more cash than an entire nation of obligatory gift-giving. It was toned down compared to the time he'd spent in the U.S., though—Christmas was less a social obligation and more a necessity for living. He enjoyed the general feel behind it, and the madness that was the Christmas economy made him smile. People were stupid and wasteful the whole year 'round, and there was nothing like a great big waste-off to ring in the new year right.

He exhaled a stream of smoke-and-steam as he waited at a half-crowded crosswalk, glancing around at the red flashing whirlwind that was downtown Shibuya. Despite the bitter weather, the city teemed with life—shoppers, most likely, interspersed with the general nightlife waiting impatiently for the streets to be theirs again. Neon signs and television screens blinked insistently above them all, casting white shadows on the snow.

His pocket twittered as he fused into the faceless crowd, and he pulled out his cell phone with another smoke-laden breath. It lay dark in his hand. Not his phone, then—his fingers shifted to the other, smaller pocket and fished out the small and barely-used pager.

Drake read the message there and raised an eyebrow, smiling faintly against the bitter air. Well, he was almost home anyway.

Arriving at his tiny underground apartment, he took the time to knock the hardened snow off his boots before heading to the back room. He'd tried, but he'd never really gotten the hang of the Japanese custom of removing outdoor shoes before coming inside—his carpet was certainly more stained than some because of it, but the place was such a wreck anyway he doubted his landlord would give him too much grief. He had exactly one window, level with the street, smoked beyond repair and cracking delicate spiderweb cracks in one corner. Fortunately, it didn't make for much of a view, anyway.

He did, however, cast of his heavy jacket onto the counter, which landed with a series of small _clunks_. In the boxy living room, he stepped over a tangled junkyard mess of wires and spare computer parts to plop onto the battered desk chair in the corner. Two switches flashed under his fingers as he dug out his cell phone and plugged it in—one for a normal landlocked line, and one for the secure transmission scrambler. He hit the scrambler, waited about thirty seconds for the interface to kick in, and dialed the number he had memorized.

"Drake," he greeted when the line clicked into place with a low buzz. No one on the other end would speak before he did.

The voice that responded was flat, robotic, and one he'd recognize piss-drunk. "Drake. This is M."

"Sure hope so. You rang?" Drake leaned back in his chair, causing it to creak obnoxiously as he stubbed out his blackened cigar in the glass tray buried in junk on the floor. It was a rare treat that M chose to contact him directly. Something had probably, somewhere, gone wrong.

The line buzzed as the voice replied in garbled English. "Yes. There's been a change in plans."

Bingo. "But I liked the plans. What was wrong with the plans?"

"I need you to infiltrate Kira tonight."

Drake whistled, pulling out another cigar and placing it between his teeth. "Sure thing. Boy, do I love working for you."

"I've already supplied you with the security plans that you will need. You don't need to do anything dangerous. Just get in and look around."

"Not dangerous, hmm?" He shook his head, swiping a match against the crumbling plaster on his wall and taking a moment to enjoy the sharp sulfur sting. "Damn. That's the best part."

"I'll expect a full report by 0200. Can you handle this?"

"Handle it?" Drake grinned, tapping the browned tobacco on the corner of his desk. "You losing your nerve, M? Have some faith." He leaned back and shut his eyes, allowing the black smoke to fully saturate his lungs. "Course I can handle it."

The grinding metal voice said nothing for a moment; Drake suspected that M wasn't used to his underlings taking such a tone. But he thought they had an understanding no different than any other employee contract—Drake did the work, M paid the tab. Courtesy didn't pay much of a role in that sort of connection.

"Very well. Make sure that you are not discovered."

Drake snorted. "Yeah, that's a given, isn't it? The man can kill me by looking at me sideways, remember?"

"That remains to be seen," M's gunmetal voice said blandly. "Don't be reckless. This is a reconnaissance job, nothing more."

"Right." He shrugged a little to himself. Reconnaissance was his specialty, after all. "I'm just checking out the layout of the house, yes?"

"Yes. Good luck." And with that, the line went silent. Drake exhaled with a grin. M wasn't one for small talk, that was for damn sure.

After a moment of letting the system boot down, he flicked off the scrambler and hauled himself to his feet. 0200… M didn't give a guy much time.

Taking one last drag on his cigar before squishing it out, Drake ambled into the bedroom to take a shower. He couldn't very well go on a job like this smelling like a nuclear explosion had happened in his ashtray.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

He wasn't sleeping, but somehow he woke; still trying to untangle this inconsistency, L inhaled and choked on the scent of burning flesh.

No, not flesh—his hazy mind supplied him with the visual as well as the thought—_hair. _It came unbidden, bringing with it the twin arrows of constant pain and sudden, seizing fear.

Light, looking for all the world as if he was sampling a particularly objective breakfast platter, had a pair of scissors in one hand and a regular, plastic butane cigarette lighter in the other. He knelt beside L's chair, one arm across the pale naked thighs, and was slowly reaching to clip short locks of hair from L's dirty tangles. He'd held the clippings between his thumb and forefinger and clinically set them aflame, causing them to hiss and sizzle weakly as they crumbled and vanished into smoke.

By the stench he'd been at it for a while, and L briefly, deliriously, wondered if his hair looked any better after an impromptu cut. Despite Light's distinctly stereotypical homosexual tendencies, including obsessive and ritualistic personal hygiene, he doubted his skill in the hairdressing arena.

His lips, dry and cracking, fought to part. "Yaga…" he managed, before his vision swayed and his brain decided to fire in another direction, leaving him disoriented.

"Morning," replied Light, probably not as cheerily as he intended. "Don't bother, you're drugged."

"How…"

"Shh," Light murmured, reaching up near his shoulder to clip a few more strands of ink-black hair. "Don't distract me."

So he shh'd, attempting to reconfigure himself, shuffling through his confused mind to try and figure out which drug exactly could make him feel as if up was suddenly sideways, and fighting off dismay when he found he could think of none… he could barely think at all, actually, and the _smell _was—

"There." Smiling pleasantly, Light leaned back to observe his handiwork—the length hadn't been lost, but L's hair was distinctly choppier and fell around his shoulders in odd little curls. "Not quite like it looked in the magazine, but I suppose it'll do." He set the scissors on the concrete with a _clink _that sounded more like a small explosion.

L's head swayed as the strength temporarily drained from his muscles, and he trembled with the effort of staying upright. "You…"

"Mmhmm," was the only response he got, before Light stood and left his swirling line of vision. The absence of his body made L notice that the television screens were black and unmoving—turned off for the first time in over a year.

He tried to focus, desperately stringing together half-formed thoughts. Light was… burning his hair. Why? To scare him, obviously, but… the screens? What was he doing now? Grunting, he forced his muddy tendons to swivel his head around to follow his tormenter's movements, only succeeding in catching the black blur when Light stepped in front of him again, dangling the lighter in front of his face.

"Know what this is?"

The base of his skull vibrated with the effort of responding. "… lighter."

"Very good." Light smiled. "What do you think I'm going to do with it?"

L blinked at him in bewilderment. "… burn me?" Somewhere under the sticky skin of his mind, he thought that, compared to some of Kira's usual torture methods, a plastic lighter wasn't so much to look at…

Light flicked the tiny flame to life, swaying it gently through the air so that it leaned and danced on its kerosene wind. "Think I could? It's a little fire… I wonder if it could grow big enough to burn you up."

_Not without tinder, _L's mind supplied helpfully. He opened his mouth to say… something, but Light let the fire die and pressed the warm metal tip of the tool against L's mouth.

"Shut up. Not a word out of you."

He flicked the fire on again, bringing it dangerously close to the pallid curve of L's lips. "I should burn you here. See if I can't kill those little comments before they come out…" His deep chocolate eyes, flickering red from the fire, rose to meet L's obsidian orbs. "Would that shut you up?"

L, against all judgment and reason, surrendered to his faint but fighting instincts; he exhaled softly, and the little flame disappeared.

Light paused, and for a moment seemed as if he was readying himself to break L's face open—but after a beat, his lips stretched into a smirk and he released an amused little laugh. "Right… too easy, isn't it?" Chuckling, he laid the pads of his fingertips near the pale jutting collarbone, fingering it delicately. "Somewhere closer, then… here?" He bypassed the gory red KIRA scar, laying the stinging tip of the lighter in the small grove directly over L's heart. "More appropriate, don't you think?"

_Kira, _the vicious part of his chemically-deranged mind sniggered, _mighty ruler of the great new world… threatening to give me heartburn. _It took some effort to keep his face impassive, though the sudden urge to laugh like a madman swelled mightily in his gut. Light met his stormy eyes and hummed thoughtfully.

"No?" His fingers, permanently stained with ink-colored blood, pulsing and vibrant in the eyes of his enemy, traced a venom trail over the tapestry of bruises and scars on the pale surface of L's stomach. L's faceless mask dropped for a moment when he realized their destination, though he bit back the pained gasp when Light traced the burning metal down his manhood, taking it in his fingers and letting the fire spark to life millimeters from the skin.

His eyes, fiery red, never left L's. He said nothing, but the poison smile twisting his lips spoke loud enough.

L felt himself begin to sweat, the severely uncomfortable touches firing arrows into his mind already wailing with confusion. The sudden parallel of being denied any bodily stimulus (other than the occasional beating) to being ambushed with it made his blood rebel against him powerfully, causing his skin to prickle and his limbs to shake.

Light lifted his flaccid prick to expose the tender underside, rolling the flame perilously close to it; the heat sunk into his skin like water into sand, and L's spine unconsciously curled in on itself, trying to move away from the violating touch and protect him. Light smirked at this, and let the flame connect—not long enough to cause any damage, but long enough that the sting made L suck in a shuddering breath and hold it, not trusting himself not to whimper.

Presently Light released him, climbing off the concrete and sauntering somewhere out of his sight. L forced himself to breathe, instantly curling into half his normal size so quickly that his knees bumped against his chin. His mind stumbled furiously through its hazy surroundings, the chemical in his brain scraping away raw emotion in its purest forms. He wanted to sleep. He wanted to stop trembling… and he wanted to rear up and tear blindly into the man who was doing this to him.

"Light…!"

A slow procession of clattering was the only answer as Light fussed over something behind him. L felt a bead of sweat slither down his back, and he pulled weakly at the chains on his wrists. "Light..."

"You burned me, Lawliet," came the quiet reply from directly behind him, causing him to jump. "I never imagined you had it in you. Impressive, really. You could have _killed _me." Light leaned down to speak against his temple, voice impassive. "Why didn't you kill me, L?"

Obviously, L thought with some degree of desperation, if he killed Light he would only die within days himself, with nothing but Kira's corpse for company. No one else had access to this room so far as he knew. He opened his mouth to say this, but the words stilled in his throat as his mind rebelled powerfully against him. He sighed, letting his head fall back.

"Light…"

Behind him, Light elevated an eyebrow with a vicious little smile. "Really," he purred, trailing a finger along the bony ridge of L's shoulders. The ex-detective had stopped responding to him by now; even drugged to the gills, his intellect was a stubborn one and refused to submit more than necessary. He straightened, enjoying the return of the dominant role between them. "I never thought you'd turn out to be such a romantic."

L's eyes dropped open, affixing him with a stare both desperate and furious. With the screens turned to silence, the only source of light in the room were two bare light bulbs attached to the ceiling; they stole the blend from the shadows, creating a stark black-and-metal contrast as a backdrop. He didn't trust himself to speak. Light resumed his customary prowl.

"I was angry," he said, in the tone of voice in which he'd talk about sports or the weather or any number of things that didn't interest him. "That's why I stayed gone so long. I think I would have really hurt you," he added a pleasant little laugh to the end of that one, the kind that made his stance and the spark in his eyes seem that much more decadent. It set a chill to the air.

"But I forgive you now. In fact… It's almost sweet." from out of nowhere, his knuckles brushed across the blistering scar on L's chest, causing him to sharply inhale. Light's eyes were a bitter burning crimson-gold, staining whatever they touched. L could feel them even when he looked away.

"This means that you belong to me. Does the _L _on my back mean that I belong to you, too?"

The drug swimming in L's blood suddenly pulled on him, holding a knife to the throat of all his reason and pride. He glanced up to meet the demonic stare, smiling with a sudden, unbidden level of malice that almost put him on parallel with the eyes of justice himself.

"'til death do us part… Kira?"

Light's eyes narrowed imperceptibly as they stared each other down for a long moment, with only the electric buzzing of the still-warm television screens around them. Then he smiled viciously, lowering his eyes with a brief nod.

"That sounds fair."

He straightened, and L recognized his body language as preparing himself to leave, taking himself back out into the world and the hell that it had become. His vision heaved again, and he thought suddenly to wonder what the side effects of this poison in his blood would be if left there. He fought to speak.

"Light… what…?"

Light glanced at him from under his perfect chestnut fringe as he picked up the scissors he'd come with. "What's in you? Don't worry. It'll pass through. Maybe some nausea, and definitely a headache… it's just alcohol." He smiled, leaning to run his fingers through the tangled mess by L's shoulders. "Which reminds me… all your food will be drugged from now on. You can choose to eat it… or not."

L only stared at him, drained of energy. Light gave him a perfect smile as he left, making sure to switch off the naked lights on the ceiling as he did. L sighed as the giant door swung closed, and the television screens did not jump back to life. The utter blackness did nothing to ease him; one form of torture at an end, another given life in its place.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

"Mello, ready to go?" Matt leaned an elbow on the doorway to the room that they shared, a small satchel slung over one shoulder. His hair was tied in a messy ponytail splaying over his shoulders, and the customary cigarette dangled unlit from his lips. Mello shot him an uninterested glance.

"Ready as I'll ever be," he replied dully, standing from the side of the bed and shutting the desktop down. They weren't sure what would happen to the stuff that they weren't taking on the jet—presumably Near would have it dealt with. He made it clear that it wasn't to their advantage to worry about such things.

But still, against his better judgment, Matt thought that he'd wind up missing this place. It wasn't like he'd never mutually invaded personal space with Mello before—they'd bunked together at Whammy's since they were three feet tall—but _this _ugly whitewash room, reeking of incense and cat hair and leftovers and tobacco even though Mello bit his head off if he smoked inside… this, with Near never sleeping in the next room and Omit in the room beyond that, had somehow come to feel more like home than Whammy's ever had.

Matt watched his friend critically as he tossed a suitcase onto the bed, slipping into his leather biker jacket that fit him like a lover. Mello steadfastly refused to meet his eyes.

"Don't you dare light that damn thing in here," he muttered, apparently able to come up with nothing else. Matt raised an eyebrow, but complacently placed the cigarette safely behind his left ear.

"Better?"

Mello only glared, hooking the strap on his small suitcase over one shoulder and stepping to the door, preparing to brush past his partner and leave. Matt leaned on the other side of the frame, effectively blocking his path.

"You gonna tell me what's got hurricane Mello huffing and puffing today?" He asked sweetly, almost childishly because he knew it would piss the blonde detective off. Mello, true to form, shot him a scowl that would melt glass.

"Autistic albino brat stealing my jet. Enough reason for you?" He snapped it as expected, but the lack of conviction in any statement featuring an insult to Near said that he wasn't as annoyed as he wanted to be. Matt stared at him dully, awaiting a different response.

Mello grew increasingly impatient with the obstacle in his path to… well, perhaps not freedom. But a confinement temporarily less severe. Both hands magnetized to his hips. "What do you _want_?"

Matt took the moment to appraise his partner's state of being. The blonde had never outgrown his propensity toward tight-fitting, low-slung and leather, and the impracticality of his attire was forever overlooked because he looked so damned delicious in it. The glittering silver rosary and crucifix lay innocently on his chest, same way it had lay ever since Matt had first met the scrawny little blonde boy back at Whammy's.

He leaned forward, catching the icy eyes. "I want you, Mello," he murmured, intentionally adding the lilt of seduction to his voice. Mello's eyes widened, narrowed and then widened again before he eventually finished, after an inappropriately lengthy pause;

"—to tell me what's wrong and stop hissing like a pissed off rattlesnake. Preferably _before _I'm trapped in a small enclosed area with you for six hours."

Mello made a sound suspiciously resembling a snort, forcibly grasping one of the slightly taller man's shoulders and bodily moving him out of the way, taking to the dark hallway with brisk booted strides. Matt had to regain his footing for a moment before scurrying after him, hoisting his satchel over his arm.

"Mello—"

"Piss off. Stop following me."

"But we're going to the same hangar." That earned him a cold, blue-eyed stare capable of breaking the strongest of minds, and it made him grin ridiculously. "Come on, Mel, I know you're not really mad at me."

Mello didn't justify that with an answer, though he knew it was true—Matt was annoying as all hell, but he couldn't really stay pissed at him for long. Which was, in itself, quite annoying.

"Mello, seriously…" He scooted in front of the blonde gunner, taking his thin shoulders in both hands. "I just want to make sure you're okay. We're going after Kira here…"

At that, Mello's eyes hardened to the point beyond mere irritation and his voice dropped from the playful tone. "I know."

Matt searched the heart-shaped face carefully, eyes lingering on the tender pink burn still harshly staining the left side. Mello was fiery and passionate by nature… but his determination for revenge on Kira bordered a dangerous line.

It was understandable, really. Kira had taken their home from them, taken _L _from them… a loss that had hit Mello harder than most. Matt had no doubt that Mello had never looked up to anyone in his life other than the great detective, so much that he was willing to work under _Near, _who he hated.

The Whammy's House explosion had also been where Mello's face had been so irreparably burned.

Mello let him look, for the moment—because what was the harm? He'd have worse things to deal with than a scrutinizing gaze by a friend when they got to Tokyo.

"I'm fine, Matt. Let me go."

He did, frowning, but held onto Mello's arm with one hand as he rooted through his bag with the other. "Here—" he said, pressing a small aluminum package into a vinyl glove. Mello blinked down at it dully, holding up a thick bar of German chocolate with toffee chips and almonds. Matt smiled vaguely. "For the trip."

Mello glanced at him with a strange form of bemusement. "We're meeting at the hangar, you know."

His redheaded partner shrugged, releasing him and hooking the sack over his shoulder. He took the cigarette from behind his ear and chewed on it. "I know."

Mello paused briefly… and then smiled one of the shy, awkward smiles of someone who didn't smile enough. The rareness of it made it that much more special to look at, and Matt had to consciously look away. He said nothing, but tucked the chocolate safely in the pocket of his jacket as he pushed open the dirt-stained door leading to the street.

"About time," said Omit, perched on the tail end of Matt's shiny red '97 Firebird with a cigarette burned down to an inch between her fingers. The day was dull and dreary, with a bitter December pull in the otherwise stagnant L.A. air. She glanced at them from over her oval sunglasses, arms crossed. "Near went ahead."

"Good," said Mello, instantly sour at the mention of their by-and-by leader. He headed for his motorcycle parked directly behind the Firebird, unhooking the helmet and latching the suitcase in its place. Matt tossed his bag in the trunk, nodding to him briefly.

"Meet you there."

"Ooh," began Omit, hopping off the car. "Mello—"

"No," said Mello, hooking on his helmet.

"Can I ride with—"

"_No_," said Mello, slinging a leg over the seat and revving his engine. He'd made the mistake, once, of allowing Omit a ride on the back of the bike once, when they'd been short on time. This ritual had thereby been born.

"Mellooooo…"

"No." Mello gunned it twice and shot into the steady stream of traffic like he'd been born into stunt work, making Matt grin at his daredevilry. Mello did know how to make a point.

"Looks like you're riding with me," he said, opening the door for her in faux gentlemanly fashion. She shot him a wounded glower that said she clearly knew they were in on this cruelty together.

Though she _might _have a point… for all Mello's flashiness on a two-wheeled vehicle, Matt could easily surpass it with four. They'd arrive with bruises.

"Fine," she said sweetly, plucking the cigarette from his mouth as she passed and claiming it as her own. "Radio's mine."

"Aw, Jesus, Omit, all you ever listen to is that techno shit…"

"Peruvi's in the backseat. Your metal scares him."

"_Why_ is the cat in my car?"

"Was I supposed to put him on the bike?"

The driver door slammed and the engine roared like a wounded beast—and the world was gray and ugly, for a while, but they'd manage for the time being.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

"Yagami," Light said into his new phone, balanced on his shoulder as he stared distractedly at his work. He'd fallen slightly behind on his database updates, and was now working to reclaim the ground. It wasn't as if anyone would notice that Kira was slightly behind schedule, except perhaps Mikami, but he still had to maintain a personal work ethic.

"Ooh, there's the man of the hour," came the slightly accented voice. "You are one hard guy you find, you know that, Kira-san?"

"I hope you've got a report, Watanabe."

"Certainly," the mechanic drawled. "I can't have a chat with my employer before business hours? No world like Kira's world…"

"Ten seconds, Watanabe."

"Right. Shall I e-mail you the results?"

Light switched from his secure connection, adding Watanabe's contact to the white list as he put him on speakerphone. "Go ahead."

"All right." Three hundred and thirty-seven pages of information scrolled onto Light's screen, unyielding flashed of black on white. "As you can see, there's no easy answer to this one. I was surprised by the level of sophistication in what looked like a fairly low-level hack." Light nodded faintly, scanning the first twelve pages in a few seconds. Watanabe had had to track through every internet proxy that had ever made contact with Kira's database. "I left it all for you to ghost over. But the interesting bits are down at the bottom…" Light scrolled accordingly.

"You can see those last six or seven proxies, they're fakes. They're open-ended bytecodes… the equivalent of people without faces, really. Those are gonna be our intruder. It's usually pretty tough to engineer one of those, especially one convincing enough to get past a security firewall like yours."

"Not amateurs, then," said Light, eyes hardening in thought.

"Not slightly. But they are traceable." Another file popped into place above the first. "That's a data map of where the proxies are coming from. They sort of bounce all over the place by nature, but generally speaking…" Two random streams of data lit up. "These two are situated around a satellite connection with a Russian space orbiter. But before we go blaming the Russians, that's really just a go-between portal. Nothing useful there. These other four originated from different digital terminals around the world, but the actual address has been erased."

Light nodded to himself, mind beginning to work over what kind of organization would have this kind of technological firepower. Japan, of course, but he had almost free reign of them… China, the U.S., possibly the U.K. Watanabe cut off that line of thinking.

"But _this _one is our special child. It's been erased, but not well, and the point of origin is pretty obviously a home PC in the western hemisphere."

"A personal computer?" Light repeated. "So it is an amateur?"

"I'm not sure if that would be the term, considering. But there isn't a government out there that would let this kind of technological know-how outside its doors."

"Can you pinpoint the terminal?"

"Not likely. It's been too well modified. _But _I can pretty easily tag every one of these proxies and make 'em set off fireworks if they ever go active again. I assume you aren't wanting me to shut them down entirely before you can figure out who's pushing the button, right?"

Light was leaning in close to his plasma screen, eyes scanning the lines of miniscule text for anything they might have missed. "Right."

"Well, the cool thing is," Watanabe added over the distinct typing sound that usually punctuated his speech, "there's a right good chance that, if this _is _a case of an internet vigilante, every single one of these false proxies might have been engineered from the same point of origin. If we track the one, we might end up trapping them all. Which will more or less lead me to the home address of your new cyber buddy."

Light frowned and leaned back in his chair, pinching the bridge of his nose. "That's kind of what I wanted by now, Watanabe. You're supposed to be the best."

"I am," came the completely honest reply, "but I'm not the _only _best. But he'll slip up before I do. I can pretty much guarantee it."

"Pretty much," he said dryly.

"And while I'm waiting for him to do that, I'll be refortifying the R.D. I'm sure you've considered that if they can get _into _your precious database, they can pretty well destroy it."

Light nodded grimly. With resources like this, his hacker could send him a virus from any direction that could potentially shut Kira down for months. It wasn't as if he couldn't use the Death Note on his own, but the database increased his efficiency too exponentially. He couldn't afford to lose that efficiency. "Do whatever you need to. I want this fool's name." He crossed his arms over his chest, releasing a long sigh before smiling faintly to himself. "I can take care of it from there."

"I'm sure you can, sir," said Watanabe coyly, shutting out the connection between their computers, leaving no trace that he was ever there. "I'm sure you can."

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

.X.

* * *

_You people are too good to me. Stop it. It's creepy._

_All right, I had to get **this **one out of the way and done. But next chapter, and most chapters henceforth, will be coming at a substantially slower rate because I frankly have other stuff to do. Besides... less than a week between updates? That's just unnatural. And wrong. Like gay marriage laws in the Republican states. Crazy stuff. __But I do aim to have another update by the 19th. Why the 19th well if you don't know then I ain't tellin you, but it's on my profile. I am superstitious about such things. Good times, had by all. _

_There were some mixed opinions on Light's relationship with Sayu in the last chapter. I think it's kind of weird too, and possibly OOC, but think about it... the man is a master of deception, and Sayu is young. Most of the younger generation does support Kira, because he's cool, and teenagers are drawn to radical thinking as a general rule. I don't think it's impossible that with his "I'm right and this is why" way of thinking he'd be able to convince the silly girl that Kira was justice and that their father had been a martyr rather than a victim. Utter lies, of course, but that's what Kiras do best._

_Aaaaas for the plothole o'doom, I still feel like a monumental twit. But your opinion matters more than mine does. Maybe if we pretend it doesn't exist, it'll go away... Thanks for all your suggestions and support. As it stands: in the world of Nyx, humans with the Eyes cannot see a name through a photograph._

_This will probably come back to bite me in the ass later._

_But c'est la vie. _


	9. Dévénir à Gris

For God will bring every deed into judgment, including every hidden thing, whether it is good or evil.

-Ecclesiastes 12:14

**Chapter Nine**

**Dévénir à Gris**

.X.

"_One man on a lonely platform, one case sitting by his side… two eyes staring cold and silent shows fear as he turns to hide…" _

England will always be renowned predominately for its weather, rain dominating the majority of the seasons. The effect is that the countryside becomes a vibrant patchwork of green and gray, powerful and healthy vegetation overlooked by mighty and towering clouds. Norfolk county in the spring of 1984 was blessed with a few clear skies, where the sun whitewashed the fields, dried the mud into gravel and summoned endless patches of sunflowers from the earth. They rolled over themselves in waves, bright golden oceans framed by wooden fences and dirt roads.

Today was not a clear-skied day, and the flowers drooped miserably under their pale pastel circumstances. The boy watched the black and gray clouds steal all of their vibrancy through the raindrop-patterned window, wishing they would speed away from him slower so that he could, at least, appreciate their situation. The music on the radio was playing at too low a volume to be convincing.

"_Une valise à ses cotés, deux yeux fixes et froids… montrent de la peur lorsqu'il se tourne pour se cacher… ah, ah, we fade to grey.. _

The man driving (Erik Soumers, 57, originally Czech by his faint accent, divorced…) hadn't said a word since Leicester, where it hadn't been raining. He'd placed the boy's light suitcase in the trunk before he'd gotten a chance to dig out one of his few, but precious, books, so the boy sat in the backseat with his shoulders tucked under the armrest, staring out the window in silence.

It wasn't the first long ride like this he'd taken… the sixth, actually, from one orphanage to another, followed by another. Norfolk was on the sea, so perhaps this one would be near the beach. He'd never been to a beach.

The car had been making a suspicious clunking noise for a little over an hour by the time Erik Soumers shifted gears with a rusty rod and turned onto a neat dirt road, leaving the sunflowers behind. The boy missed the sign proclaiming the name of the moderate eastern city they entered, but suspected he wouldn't really need to know it. The building looked suspiciously similar to the last home he'd stayed in, all white plyboard and clean windows with a polite, hand-painted sign. _St. Antoine's Home for Troubled Young Men._

"Troubled" was a step up… no one had bothered to explain where he was going or why, but he understood anyway. He understood more, really, than any of the nameless, faceless men who decided his fate could ever really account for.

Which was probably why he was here.

"_Sent la pluie comme un été anglais, comme les notes d'une chanson lontaine sortant de derrière d'un poster…" _

He didn't pay much attention as the soon-to-perish vehicle gurgled to a halt on the gravel drive and his driver went to get his suitcase, taking it inside without a glance at the boy in the backseat. He'd climb out of the car when he was told to, or, if they forgot about him, when the stars rose to act as his guide.

The former eventually came, and he wasn't sure how he felt about it. Erik Soumers returned with an overweight, balding man in his forties, who smiled superficially and walked with a slight limp. He listened as they ambled down the path, gravel cracking wetly under their feet.

"—the retarded child, is it?"

"Autistic, I b'lieve they say."

"Oh, well. I'm not sure there's much of a difference, myself. All the way from Leicester, are you? You must be exhausted. Please see to our cafeteria if you're hungry."

"Thank you, sir, but I've…" he trailed off as the balding man hauled open the back door that the boy had been leaning on, causing him to brace himself on his elbows and look at the two of them upside-down.

"Hello there," he said in a voice too loud to be friendly. "I'm Thomas. You must be Lawson! Welcome to St. Antoine's. Come on out, boy."

He had to maneuver himself a fair amount to clamor out of the vehicle, limbs awkward and sore from the ride. He was dwarfed by both men, staring up at them and speaking with a voice faint from disuse, but steady enough to satisfy him. "No, sir. My name is L."

Thomas shot a glance at the driver, who shrugged and gave a dismissive wave. "Lawson's just what they called him at Jonas' place. It's all in the file," he muttered vaguely, drawing the brim of his hat over his brow. "I had better get a move on now, sir, Jonas'll be wantin' his car."

"Yes, yes. Good to see you, Erik. Give Jonas my regards."

"Aye."

The car made gave a pained gurgle before it conceded to start, and L estimated it would break down a little less than halfway back to Leicester. A dirty gravel cloud sprayed from under its tires as it ground away; the boy watched it disappear into the wavering gray for a few moments before he turned to follow Thomas into his new, if temporary, home.

"_Esperant que la vie ne fut si longue. Ah, ah, we fade to grey… fade to grey…"_

St. Antoine's was in need of a thorough cleaning and an added wing; the children were left to their own devices for most of the day, mildly supervised, and only restrained if they had displayed self-injuring or violent tendencies. They weren't often allowed outside, as there was no fence around the property. L was assigned to a low level segment of boys with learning and behavioral disabilities. They still thought he was underdeveloped mentally… and perhaps he was. He didn't know, and he didn't care to correct them. Thomas handed over his file to a young, weather-skinned man, and they discussed him as he sat quietly and pretended not to listen.

"—five years old? He barely looks three."

"Yes, yes… a very sad case, really. Children's Asperser's syndrome, Jonas called it… he knows how to speak, but he doesn't interact well with other children, and you can see all his weird habits. I wouldn't bother trying to teach him anything, myself. Jonas' people tried to work with him and… well, now he's here."

L closed his eyes as his caretakers flipped through page after page of basic information and disciplinary reports. He didn't know why he was so wrong. He didn't _want _to be different.

"… Lawliet? He's French? What's his first name?"

"Doesn't seem to have one. The parents probably turned him over without naming him. Call him whatever you want, just file him under "L" and be done with it."

"I see…"

"Just keep him quiet and make sure he doesn't cause any trouble. I've got to go make sure the records are in order… that crazy inventor's coming by tomorrow, do you remember?"

"Aye… wants to sponsor us, does he?"

"So he says… I'm not sure he doesn't just want to gain partnership for that institution he's opening. Another old man with too much money, I say."

"Well, if he does, he might take some of our children off us… and that would be a blessing, yeah?"

"True enough… I still wish these corporate bastards would mind their own damn business."

L wished that too, even later, lying in a hard bed with the soft snores and muffled sobs of the lost children making the air in the room heavy and stagnant. He didn't want to be here, he didn't want to read sentences for faceless adults or talk to rich inventors with pity schemes.

He wanted to be left alone. He wanted his books, torn and tattered and stained from the repeated times they'd been thrown out. If he couldn't have that, he really just wanted to die.

"_Feel the rain like an English summer, hear the notes from a distant song… stepping out from a backdrop poster, wishing life wouldn't be so dull. Dévénir à gris. Ah, ah, we fade to gray, fade to gray."_

_.X._

_.X._

_.X._

_.X._

_.X._

_.X._

Despite his previous knowledge of the relatively undeveloped electric security in the mansion belonging to Kira, it took Drake the better part of an hour to find an open spot. It occurred to him that he probably should have investigated the layout himself before actually attempting a breach, and decided sourly that it was just like M to give him this kind of short notice. But he'd managed more with less in the past, and the job was, indeed, the job.

When he found it, it came in the form of the tiny outdoor office where the security guards watched screen upon screen of video footage. They were surprisingly unguarded themselves, and a short toss of a sleeping-smoke bomb was all it took to knock them out for good. He stepped over their snoring, smelly bodies to disable the video feed—took a decent bit of digital maneuvering, a few minutes longer than he'd expected, but it went down fairly painlessly.

He wondered, later while sliding around the corner close to a full-length window on the eastern side, at the low level of security on the outside. This was Kira, after all—alternately the world's most revered and most wanted man. The relative simplicity made him paranoid, and he almost hoped that the difficulty would be beefed up once he got inside.

Then he inwardly smacked himself, because Kira made a living killing people—not incarcerating them, not making them endlessly suffer—killing them dead. A dead Drake would be a no-good Drake. How would he get paid?

Grinning despite himself, because he always got weird during jobs like his, Drake laid a gloved hand on the side of the window. The tiny laser attached to the inside of his wrist emitted a low hum as he traced it along the outside of the windowpane, carefully working into the latch. He didn't need to break the thing, he just needed to open it; when the latch disconnected with a soft click, he flattened himself to the brick and waited as the glass pane swung slowly open.

When no sirens blared into the air, he slipped around the corner, feeling his feet hit soft carpet. He flicked a set of infrared lenses over his eyes, glancing around—he'd made his way into a ground-floor dining room or something, ornate to the point of being absurd, and obviously never used. He couldn't imagine that Kira held frequent dinner-parties; he was not your average politician, after all.

Now came the tricky part. It was many times easier to secure the inside of a building then the outside, and he carried no electric-detection devices—anything he could use to determine the location of cameras or trips was too bulky to be of use in a mission that required stealth. He was going to have to maneuver it by instinct, and with any luck he'd find something that would interest M enough to justify leaving before he had to start upstairs.

Keeping a sharp eye on the black-and-red surroundings, Drake called on the mental memory map he'd made of the place. If he remembered the blueprints correctly, he had two directions in which to sneak, other than the stairs; to the left of this room lay a large parlor-entryway, through which the living room could be located. In the other direction was the kitchens, and the small passageway that probably led to a basement or something, his blueprints hadn't extended that far. He deliberated. Logically, heading upstairs was his best bet; the bedrooms and office would be there. He didn't really feel up to slinking around Kira's bed while he slept, but generally speaking security was less tight in the personal living space.

Decisions, decisions. He slid silently to the door of the room in which he'd arrived, noting that he was leaving footprints on the carpet behind him—but they were just water from the snow outside, and would be dry by morning.

The hallway was dreadfully silent. Drake took this to be a good sign as he peered to the left; door and parlor, just as expected. A slick digital clock mounted over a bookcase told him that it was almost one; he needed to get out of here in less than an hour to make his report. He couldn't really afford unnecessary snooping.

But the layout of a house involved the layout of the house. He padded gently in the direction of the front door, peering into the living room.

It was relatively harmless, all giant tapestry windows and sleek black leather couches. There was a giant plasma T.V. that Drake estimated with a twinge of resentment to be about half the size of his apartment; it was switched on, bathing the room in a washed out blue glimmer. He wondered briefly at this as he slipped along the wall toward the far side.

But he stopped dead halfway through, blood coming to a complete stop as his eyes darted to the golden streak in his infrared vision. The streak split into four streaks, each forming a long limb—dear fucking hell, there was somebody on the couch. How in the hell had he not noticed this before? Jesus, he was going to die. Gonna _die… _

One hand slid to the pistol strapped on his thigh as the other flicked the lenses from his eyes, dropping to a crouch as he aimed the narrow gun at—

Nothing.

Drake blinked, pupils expanding as his vision was torn from red to blue, the late-night comedy show illuminating the expansive room and the very empty leather couch. He felt himself break into a sweat.

Creeping forward, pistol guiding him through the shadows, he stepped around the piece of furniture to aim haphazardly at the bare carpet behind it. Nothing, no sound half-hidden by the canned laughter emitting lowly from the screen. A glass-and-mahogany coffee table glowed in front of it, holding nothing but a magazine and two apple cores—the first out-of-place items he'd seen in the building, but nothing that resembled a tall gangly-limbed person lounging on the leather.

Steadying his hand, Drake reached to his eyes to click the infrared lenses back in front of them, half expecting the heat-streak phantom to reappear. It didn't.

He unleashed a long breath, mind racing as he slipped the gun back into its holster. One of two things had occurred—well, three, but he highly doubted the existence of invisible people that watched late-night T.V. Either his infrared had glitched, which had never happened before, or he'd hallucinated… which had happened, but never on a job of this magnitude.

And now that he was duly _terrified_, he couldn't in good faith trust his judgment to proceed. Perhaps he should just back out now, and tell M he'd failed… and end up with a bullet in his head because M didn't like failure very much at all.

God. Jesus.

Drake shook his head to clear it, willing his heart back to a manageable rhythm. He reset his mind back to reconnaissance mode, but pretty swiftly high-tailed it out of that room. Time for plan B.

The office wasn't hard to find; after he'd made his way silently up the black-lacquered spiral staircase, the door was unlocked and open across the hall. It looked… like an office: bookshelf-lined walls and a stout mahogany desk before a wide tapestry window. He wasn't quite sure what he'd been expecting of Kira's death factory, but he hadn't expected it to strongly resemble his grandparents' house.

Still spooked from his ghost sighting downstairs, he carefully scanned the walls, corners, all the hidden spaces where a laser might come shooting out at his head, but found none. He spotted cameras all over the place, but he'd disabled the feeds, so this should run quite a lot more smoothly than he'd expected it to.

And there was the prize. Drake did a little inward victory hoot as he shadowed his way over to Kira's gorgeous plasma desktop computer, pulling a digital memory stick from its place strapped beneath his belt. It was amazing how nobody had ever one-upped Kira before! He'd simply copy the hard drive within a few minutes and he'd be well on his way to financing his next vacation with M's money. He couldn't help but grin beneath his mask as he booted the beauty up.

Except for what his job required, Drake wasn't particularly computer-savvy. The sudden stream of lines and numbers that scrolled onto the flat screen were little more than hieroglyphics to him, but the disk he'd plugged into the modem was equipped with a data worm. It automatically copied all information it came into contact with, neat and tidy for somebody else to decipher at their leisure. Nifty little device.

His apprehension from earlier evaporated. This was gonna be good.

As the worm worked its magic, he slid open the top drawer in the stocky desk, poking around aimlessly. He didn't really expect to find anything of use here, but he couldn't resist; it was arguably the most powerful desk in the world, after all. The top drawer led to predictable surprises: three thick manila folders, two notepads and a pen. Everything was perfectly placed, aligned and in order... Kira was OCD, go figure.

Carefully extracting it from the top of the stack, he thumbed through one of the folders. It was mostly police reports and criminal statistics, all with a large "ELIMINATED" scribbled across the front page in a careful scrawl. This, while extremely creepy, said something about the man that Kira was: he liked reminders of his successes. Drake recognized some of the cases as being extremely difficult ones, most of which Kira had aided the police force in capturing. It meant he was a narcissist, and accomplishment was something that fed his ego in a big way.

Drake smiled idly to himself as he slid the folder back into its place. Like _that _wasn't obvious. It took an egoist to take over the world, supernatural powers be damned.

The flash drive blinked merrily as it did his work for him, but he was beginning to get antsy. Now that he had his excuse to take off, he was ready to book it. The computer seemed to be brimming with data… which was good in that it would make his employer happy, and bad in that it took the disc forever to reformat it into a manageable compact size. His thigh bounced perceptibly, nervously, as his eyes shot to the blinking disc and back.

He delicately fished out the pen with two gloved fingers. Everything was so perfectly in order that it gave him a bizarre little thrill to screw with it, if only briefly. He'd been trained to leave no traces, and was confident in his ability to replace the desk materials exactly as he found them.

It was a nice pen. Untarnished silver and black wood, probably a gift from some corrupt politician or another; the old-fashioned kind that needed an inkwell. He examined it absently for a few seconds before laying it on the desk and leaning back in his chair, pulling the glove from his left hand to run his fingers through his short black spikes, exhaling slowly. Almost over.

The pen, though, caught his attention again as it rolled a little from the spot he'd set it. The silver tip jiggled slightly, as if it had been unscrewed and then left loose. Drake found this odd—the thing didn't look as if it had ever been used, let alone taken apart. Curious, he picked the pen up again, carefully unscrewing it.

It slid open easily, and he nearly dropped the inside inkwell as a tiny, rolled up slip of paper fell from the unscrewed cartridge. It landed on the leather chair beside him, and he balanced the pen in his right hand as he retrieved the paper with his left.

Unrolled, it was little more than an inch long, and looked like it had been torn from a larger sheet of lined notebook paper. Other than that, it was blank.

"Weird," he muttered, carefully rerolling the slip around the inkwell and reassembling the pen. So Kira was OCD, _and_ he kept random pieces of paper hidden in pens. Whatever. Psychoanalysis was not part of his job.

A few seconds after he pulled his glove back on, the computer let out a barely-audible beep as the flash disc clicked out of the drive. Hallelujah. It was done, he was out of here and ready for a drink.

Slipping the disc and all its precious cargo into the slot on his belt, he set about arranging the desk back the way it was when he found it. Folder on the pile, pen placed parallel to the drawer handle, chair angled just so. He'd worked jobs like this where half a millimeter of movement could set off alarms, and he suspected this was one of those times. It took a few moments before he was satisfied, but he was finally, finally ready to make like a tree, and speed-crept back into the hall.

He made it as far as the top of the sleek black staircase before a blistering white supernova of pain latched firmly onto the back of his neck, sending him toppling forward down several steps where he landed in a heap. A pair of footsteps followed him, ramming a police issued stun-gun into his gut this time, effectively shocking the wits out of him.

His vision blurred and blackened. But a pair of eyes like _that_—fire-red and steel-cold all at once—those eyes stayed with you even after you fell asleep.

_"—me, Ryuk. Nice of you."_

_"Yeah, well—gave me a scare downstairs—watching T.V. Just wanted you to get rid of him."_

_"—still. I owe you one—"_

_"Hyuk hyuk hyuk—careful—touched—a piece of the Death Note."_

"Did he." Light replied, staring cooly down at the unconscious assassin and nudging him with one foot, pocketing the taser. "Well, that doesn't matter. I'll get rid of him for you." The shinigami cackled and disappeared through the wall, presumably back to the television. Who knew gods of death could be so easily entertained?

"Now then…"

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* * *

_Eheh, yeah, my bad._

_I have excuses, but I'm sure you're not interested. Ah well. See you next time._

_Reviews would really help my writer's block, I think. No lie._


	10. Acacia

**NOTE: **This chapter is _incomplete_. As, more than likely, is the story. This has been sitting around on my hard drive for months, no lie, and if I ever finish it, it'll be after I get my shit sorted out. I'm going to miss it in the meantime, but, you know. Life.

Thank you guys for staying with me til now. You are badass. Peace.

- Zeph

.X.

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Look now how mortals are blaming the gods, for they say that evils come from us, but in fact they themselves have woes beyond their share because of their own follies.

- Homer

**Chapter 10**

**Acacia**

.X.

If it'd been chilly in L.A., it was colder than the Drow ice tundra in Tokyo. Matt grumbled viciously to himself every time his muscles succumbed to a shiver. You just didn't develop the proper immunity to cold when you lived in California. Omit was mummifying her shoulders in a scarf that was really more built for fashion than freezing; Mello had to be positively suffering in his outfit, but he gave no quarter.

All of this was summarily forgotten at this particular moment, however, craning their necks toward the ice-gray sky in dumbfounded silence.

"… shit," said Matt, and his partners nodded in agreement.

The building at which the limo dropped them off was… hardly fit to be called a building. A great fortress of steel, towering above the surrounding structures and making the skyscrapers of downtown Tokyo look like Lego palaces. Near hadn't exactly warned them; he'd vaguely referred to their new place as a "hideout", making them think of another rathole apartment. Bacteria couldn't hide out in there.

Mello made a _tch_ sound, striding forward with his arms crossed. "Ridiculous. This is just like that little ass."

"Yeah," said Matt vaguely, though he inwardly disagreed. This wasn't like Near at all. It was more like…

After a few more minutes of standing around feeling stupid, they eventually had to figure out how to get _in_ the damn thing. The front door and lobby was easy enough; they'd each been given a key card on the jet. Past that, however, every other door had fingerprint, retinal and voice identification. Mello would have had to strip down entirely to get past the metal detectors, so instead he darted through the doors when they opened for Matt, which set off alarms every time. They ignored them, and eventually they stopped.

It was on the sixteenth floor that they found Near, alone, hunched on the floor in front of a monolith computer console, playing with a model train.

"Where's our shit?" Was the first thing out of Mello's mouth, and Matt had to bite on a grin.

Near's eyes flickered at them, muted disinterest falsifying whatever irritation he felt. "I've had your things delivered to your rooms. All the floors above this one are the living quarters." Mello drew a breath for a new demand, but Near beat him to it. "Your vehicles will arrive tomorrow evening, by boat."

Omit's eyes were wide and she'd fallen silent, gazing around at the hi-tech surroundings and looking as if she felt wholly out of place. It made sense; Whammy's kids were used to quite a number of things that normal people never saw; a place like this really was right up Near's alley, even if he preferred to keep a little more of a low profile. She was the outsider, and it was more apparent now than it had been before.

"Where'd you get this place?" Matt asked presently, loitering by the staircase that led to the upper levels and twitching. He needed a damn cigarette. "You didn't have it built, did you?"

Near's eyes slid back to his toys. The light from the monitors on the wall shimmered of his white pajamas and stained them blue, making him look like an electric ghost hunched there on the floor. He was silent for several moments.

"… it was a gift," was his eventual reply, flicking a switch that made the little train hum along on its electric tracks, rattling quietly. Matt raised an eyebrow at his back, but kept his mouth shut. There was a lingering silence.

That wasn't like Near either, now that he thought of it. Now that they'd all arrived, he'd figured Near would pin them all straight to business. They were here for a reason, after all.

Omit suddenly shook herself from her trance, shooting a smile in Matt's direction and stepping toward the stairs. "I'm gonna go check out the upstairs. Place this bloody buggering big ought to have some sweet accommodations."

"Wait up," Matt ambled after her, seizing on the chance to go find someplace to smoke. He locked eyes with Mello briefly, silently inviting him along and away from Near and all his weirdnesses. The blonde gave a barely visible shake of the head, eyes flicking toward the impressive computer terminal with a barely-muted zeal. Straight to work, then. Well, there was no stopping him. Matt took the stairs at a canter, rummaging around through his pockets for his cigarettes.

The place really was impressive. All the doors in the living quarters were open, leading into some expansive and attractive rooms, but the hallway itself was as dark and metallic as downstairs had been. It was _hospitable_, but the entire building had an overwhelming coldness to it. He didn't figure it would go away, either, with just the four of them in this mausoleum.

Omit kept striding in front of him and clattering up stairs, determinedly making her way to the roof Matt had to take a step back when she hauled open the whitewash steel door; the chill here was absolutely unfair. Omit stepped out into it though, lighting up a cigarette and tossing him her lighter out of habit. It'd been a long damn flight. Two gigantic air conditioning motors whirled on the other side of the roof.

There was a frosty mist in the air and some hesitant slush from the snow the night before, but the view was a pretty awesome one. It was about seven in the morning, but the city had been awake for hours; even from this height, they could smell the gasoline and food smells of Japan's capital. It was just as dirty as L.A., if not more so, a visible layer of smog intermingled with the frost. Matt would have thought that to be reversed, but maybe he'd just been too long in L.A.

He inhaled, charmed by the feeling of smoke crackling in his lungs. He didn't get people who tried so hard to quit smoking. He felt like it was some rebellious, twisted way of taking hold of his destiny. He'd much rather die of lung cancer than by bullet. "O," he said conversationally, leaning up against the rail and feeling the icy chill sink through his clothes, "it's a little chilly out here."

She gave him a wry glower, sighing out disease. "Noted, M. But we're probably going to have to get used to it."

"Bleh." He tugged the fabric of his sweatshirt over his mouth and exhaled, circulating damp heat into his chest and throat. Omit's bare elbows were crossed over the guardrail, and he eyed her speculatively. "You okay?"

She gazed out at the city for a few moments. "I don't know. Maybe." A soft breath from her cancer stick expelled itself as a ghost into the air. "I'm not sure what the hell we're doing here."

"Other than freezing our collective asses off," Matt griped. "I guess we're gonna save the world."

Omit scoffed, her boots shifting on the gravel. "World's already saved."

"Unsave it, then?"

"Hah." She looked up toward the sky, hazel eyes grim and thoughtful. "Saving the world… will that make us the anti-Kira? Does the world even want to be saved?"

_Messiah, _the world called the man with the murder book, praising him for his merciful thinning of their numbers. Kira _was _the world's savior. "Probably not," he said quietly, balancing his own cigarette between his teeth and shoving his hands into his pockets. "But we've still got to try."

Omit absorbed that in silence for a while, releasing a long sigh. "Unwelcome heroes," she mused, and then shrugged. "I guess I'm really wondering what _I'm _doing here. I'm still a little shocked that N invited me along with this little troupe."

He tilted his head at her. "You are part of the team. Is that what you're worried about?" It made sense, and he'd sort of thought that she'd probably feel that way. She wasn't one of L's, after all. "Is Near being an ass? M and me can beat him up if you want."

"Pfft. He could take you, easy," she quipped. Below them, traffic-jam confusion and car horns floated on the wind like the city's own wraith. "But if you _do _beat him up, make sure you ask him what he's up to. I get the distinct feeling that he's only keeping me around for some weird Near entertainment purposes."

"Omit," Matt said seriously. "You are not that entertaining."

"Maybe for you, but what about for a brain-alien?"

_That _was a mental image that was never going away, and it made him laugh. "Good point." A flick of his head sent his burned-down cigarette flying down into twenty-three stories of space, and Omit watched it fall. "But all Jedi mind-tricks aside, I really wouldn't sell yourself short, O. You're important here."

"Near doesn't think that way," she said darkly. "I don't have anything to offer him. I can hack, but you're better. I'm good with weapons, but Mello's better… I guess I can con, but Near can do that for himself."

"Why do you care so much about what Near thinks?" said Matt, genuinely bewildered. "He's not your boss. He's definitely not mine or Mello's. We've all got the same goal—we all want to stop Kira. Yeah, Near's just using us, but we're using him back."

Omit shrugged again, kicking at the rail absently. The skin on her arms was ridged with cold, but she seemed to have blocked it out. "Maybe that's part of it. The truth is, if I hadn't met you guys then I probably wouldn't be against Kira. The world doesn't mean enough to me to care whether or not he rules it."

"Now you sound like Mello," Matt replied with a grin. "but don't think of it like that. He figures screw the world. But, you know… just think about whatever it is you _do _care about. That's what we're saving."

There was a faint shine of humor in her kohl-coated eyes as they slid sideways to look at him. "Yeah? What is it that Mello cares about, then?"

"Hell if I know." He huffed with cold, hunching over a little on the rail. "Revenge, maybe. For L."

"Not for his… face?"

"Maybe." It was true that the blonde gunner's anger had really only boiled over when that fucker had blown half his face off—and while there was no _proof _that that had been the work of Kira directly, it was definitely a result of one of his demented followers, and that was good enough for Mello. "For a lot of things, I guess. Kira's taken a lot from him, in one way or another."

Omit looked contemplative as she watched his face. "He's got you, though," she said quietly, thoughtfully. Matt smiled.

"I'm not L."

She arched an eyebrow in curiosity. "Well, that's got to hurt."

"Nah. It's just…" he waved a hand in a vague dismissive gesture. "It's how Mello works."

"Hm." She looked back over the city, looking less pensive. "I guess you'd know. Still, you'd think he'd wake up some morning and notice you for a change." Matt blinked at her dumbly. She smirked at him. "I always kind of figured you two had something going on, but I never knew what. Now I do."

He blanched, feeling his face heat a little against the wind. "Crap. Am I really that readable?"

"Uh… yeah, Matt, you are." Omit threw him a grin, prodding him mildly in the arm with one crimson nail. "You follow the guy around like the freakin' paparazzi. It's pretty cute in a totally weird and pathetic kind of way."

"Thanks. You're a doll."

"Anytime." She arched her shoulders, more than happy to switch from her own insecurities to his. "Why don't you just ask him?"

He shrugged, pulling out another cigarette. "Ask him what? If he'll be my cuddle-bunny?" He lit the stick aflame before the fire was blown out hard by the wind. "Have you _met _Mello?"

"Of course. And I know he's just as lonely as anybody else. Maybe he wouldn't object to being somebody's…" she pressed her fingers to her lips to silence the giggles, "I'm sorry, would you say that again? I can't do it."

He glowered, but there was a dry grin in his eyes. "Don't hold your breath. He just doesn't operate that way. Mello's all about putting away Kira, and he doesn't think about other stuff unless he has to."

Omit pinned him with a stare. "Have _you _met Mello? You make him sound so emotionless when you know it couldn't be further from the truth. You make him sound like _Near._" She reached over and took the cigarette from between his fingers, taking a drag off it as her eyes lingered on his face. "He cares for you, Matt."

"That's the problem," Matt griped quietly. "His emotions are like hurricanes. Yeah, he cares, but only to the degree that it gets him what he wants. Which is how it should be," he continued as she drew a breath to interrupt. "We're teammates. Anything more… complicated would screw up the team. We've got too much to worry about already."

She shook her head in disbelief. "That's… stupid. God, I don't get you people. Caring about somebody is not a weakness."

"It can be," Matt said, "if it distracts you from doing something like, say, stopping the world's most powerful murderer. If Mello and me got involved, there'd always be that risk. I wouldn't know that I could do my job if it meant he got hurt, or… something. Hard choices like that."

Omit glared at him, all humor gone. "A little late for that, isn't it, Matt? Could you let him get hurt _now?"_

He shut up for a moment, eyes drifting along the dirty Tokyo skyline. He didn't like to think about this shit. It was too easy to ignore that any one of them could die, at any moment, with no warning at all. That was the kind of power that they were trying to take on, just the four of them. And while they were all prepared to die if it meant the end of Kira…

"It doesn't matter," he said finally, tossing his second cigarette to the gravel and stepping on it, straightening against the rail. "Destroying Kira is priority. We _can't_ lose sight of that."

She shook her head again but said nothing, following him back across the roof to the steel door. The sun was warming the air a little now. Matt smiled faintly, casting one last glance at the sky. "If we did, we'd be letting L down. And then Mello really would kill me."

"He'd better," Omit said sullenly, dark mood slipping comfortably into place as she kicked the door shut. "I imagine he'd do it a lot more pleasantly than the Death Note."

.X.

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It was weird how his vision could pulse colors when he was fairly certain his eyes weren't even open—red to black, faint flashes of electric green. It kept like a metronome to the pounding in his skull.

"Fuck," Drake heard himself cough, spitting a sour string of saliva to the floor. He was laying face down, cheek pressed painfully into hard icy concrete. It took several seconds for the thought of opening his eyes to occur to him.

When it did, he sat up swiftly, causing another wave of nausea to roll over him. "Fuck," he repeated, eloquently, grinding his knuckles into his skull. And then he said it again, because there was simply no other word to describe his state of displeasure. "_Fuck_."

Focus. _Focus_. What was going on?

He'd been caught, that's freakin' what. Drake had _never_ been caught, not since he'd first started taking reconnaissance jobs on his own. Spotted, once or twice, but certainly never snuck up upon and knocked out. Christ. There went the rest of his career. He'd be flipping burgers and filling gas tanks by the time this got out. _Hell_.

Although, he thought grimly, peeling his eyes open and squinting around, one had to be alive to flip burgers. Which was swiftly not looking like a permanent characteristic of his.

It was dark, and it took his eyes several painful contractions to adjust to the low lighting. The resilient blur made him wonder if he had a concussion, but he didn't dwell on it; wasn't much to be done about it in any case.

He was sprawled in a dark niche of a room, back propped on the icy metal edge of what looked like a thick, explosive-resistant door. The only light came from a dimming yellow bulb in the middle of the room, so close to dying that it seemed to cast more shadow than light. Lined along both lengths of the walls were thick television screens mounted on the concrete, installed so that no cords or equipment were outside the wall. They gave it the look of a security maintenance room, but so _many_ screens, all uniform and reflecting the same yellow glimmer from the bulb, was creepy on a new level.

He'd been stripped of his equipment—not surprising. He sighed and hoisted himself to his knees, using the door for support. He ached terribly, with what felt like a great walloping bruise on the back of his neck where the SOB had tasered him. That had been dirty, and he hoped he lived to get the bastards back if nothing else. His mind kept working, cracking the occasional snide comment, trying to keep him from panic. It worked, mostly, and he gave a grim chuckle as he took a shaky step into the shadows, forearm braced on the steel door to support him.

"Not very hospitable, Kira." He was vaguely reminded of a quote by Oscar Wilde declaring that if this was how the Queen kept her prisoners, then she had no business having any. His head spun viciously when he moved, a thousand little aches flaring to life in his body. But, he thought cheerily, it couldn't hurt any more than dying. He doubted he was dead, as he was most certainly going to hell, and everybody knew that hell didn't have TV.

The room he was in was narrow but longer than he'd originally estimated. In its center was a single metal desk, directly under the light bulb. When he felt steady enough to leave the wall, he made his way haltingly over to it, pulling open the first of three drawers on one side. Then he blinked, reaching up to take hold of the light bulb and angle it into the drawer to ensure that he was seeing what he thought he was—the thing was full of _knives. _From a simple hunting blade to some exotic fillet-cleaver thing, even a jewel-studded ornamental dagger.

No damn way. Why would Kira lock him up only to supply him with _weapons? _Drake'd had at least three different types of knives on him when he'd been caught, surely his captor could tell that he knew his way around a blade.

Well, whatever. Despite the distinct creepy feeling that was gnawing on his mind, he selected a few of the sharpest knives and hooked them into the empty holsters still strapped to his waist, trying hard not to think about the fact that several of them looked as if they had dried blood in their grooves. _Escape first, freak out later. _That sounded like a good plan.

As he shut the first drawer and reached for the second one he froze, listening. There was a tiny sound, barely perceptible, but amplified slightly by the echo against the hard concrete walls. A metal _clink _reverberated once and then retreated into silence, and Drake instinctively dropped onto the balls of his feat in a defense stance as he whirled silently around.

A pair of glassy gray eyes looked unblinkingly back at him. There was a… person… seated on a rolling chair a few feet behind him, half of the gaunt face obscured by impossibly thin, pale knees. They were curled up like a child, head tilted curiously as the lifeless gaze watched him.

But what arrested his attention most strongly was the pair of iron manacles clamped onto bruised wrists, a short length of chain bolting the person to a bar in the floor. Their arms and legs were crisscrossed with thick, ugly scars.

"Oh, shit," Drake breathed without thinking. There was no response, although the wide eyes blinked once. Fuck fuck fuck.

Drake backed up so that his legs were to the desk, hands slipping from the knives where they had shot to out of habit, and willed his heart to stop jackhammering. Some distant, childish (and definitely unprofessional) part of his mind ran through horror scenarios, like Kira had locked him in here with a psycho and he was gonna get slicked up Texas Chainsaw style. But there was the matter of the chains—they looked secure, and, while spooky, they did help him panic a little less. Besides, if Kira wanted him dead, he could do it with his brain without the added dramatics.

On top of that, the guy—now that he looked, it was apparent that the person was male—looked strung out. He was emaciated and terribly pale, and Drake recognized the blank look in his eyes as the effects of something expensive and damaging. PCP, maybe. How long had he been chained up here? Jesus…

"Hey there," he said, brilliantly, swallowing. The shallow stare was unnerving. If the guy _was _on drugs, there was no telling how dangerous he could be, chains be damned. He'd seen people flip cars with their bare hands jacked up on that shit. "I'm Arlo Dracien. I'm a CIA agent. I'm going to see if I can get you out of here, okay?"

Even as he said it, he felt a hollow dread drop into his stomach. The CIA bit was of course a lie, he used that one pretty frequently. But… _why in the hell _had he just told a junkie his real name? Christ, he hadn't actually said it aloud in the better part of ten years. He was panicking, that was it. G_et a grip, D, _he internally snapped at himself. That kind of slip could easily get him killed. He was _not _going to die down here.

But the man in the chair still said nothing, although the curious tilt of his head increased a few degrees. A drop of sweat slithered down Drake's back. He kept talking, half to steady himself. "I'm just gonna take a look around, okay? Don't worry. We're gonna get this under control."

Something in the words seem to flip a switch, and the pale body was instantly alive. Drake jumped a little as the thin arms unfolded themselves and the face lifted, emitting a guttural laugh. It was quite possibly the creepiest thing Drake had ever heard.

"You don't seem to know where you are, Agent Dracien." The voice was low and crackling, hoarse from disuse. Dear god. This guy had really been chained up down here for months… years? Drake fisted his hands, slick with sweat. He didn't sound confused or delusional, though.

"I know enough," he said evenly. He didn't want to antagonize the guy. "And I'm not staying long. Kira can be arrested for this. You—"

But he was cut off with a sudden howl of laughter, so sharp and sudden that his hand flew back to the blades at his waist. The man's small shoulders jerked rapidly as he tossed his head back and cackled—definitely drugs, then.

"Kira can be— yes," he hissed as the laughter died as quickly as it came. "I'm sure you will succeed in arresting Kira, Arlo Dracien, and the best of luck to you indeed."

Hearing his own name, something that had to be so guarded, spoken by a stranger made Drake feel weak. He inhaled carefully, keeping his voice low and even. "Why don't you tell me your name? How long have you been a prisoner here?"

Eyes like that, so unfocused and yet so rigid, wide but devoid of the frightened darting that he was used to seeing in people with substance in their veins… they were unsettling. They gazed at him critically, almost condescendingly, for a long moment, during which Drake noticed just how extensive the scars on his body were. There were harsh bruises all along his face and shoulders, and the cuts themselves looked like they had been deep. Drake's stomach rolled in on itself when he realized, sickeningly, that he had a pretty good idea of whose blood was dried onto the knives in the desk.

This guy had been _tortured. _Fucking hell, he was not ready for this.

As of now, the man's arms crossed more comfortably over his knees as the energy ebbed from his voice without notice, also typical of those on drugs. "I have been here, according to the screens, for eight years and four months," he said easily, sounding almost conversational now. "A little more now, I suppose. They've been off for a while."

"Fuck," Drake said shakily. "I mean. Okay. Fuck." He sat down on the metal desk, hard, making it scoot noisily on the concrete and rattle under his weight. He'd changed his mind—maybe this _was _hell.

The chains clinked faintly as the man smirked dryly at him, taking amusement from Drake's shock. "But I wouldn't worry about that," he continued quietly, almost at a murmur, eyes softening a little as they lingered on him. "I don't think you'll be here quite as long. It's probably already written down…"

"What do you mean? What's written down?" He had to be calm. Had to be, or there was no way he was getting out of this in one piece. He fished around for something else to say, because talking made him feel like he had a clue. "Can you tell me your name?"

His captive colleague emitted another dark chuckle. "Ah, but if it were so easy," he muttered.

"Okay. Fine." He was getting annoyed, but there was no way he was going to win that fight. "That's fine. Can you at least tell me why you're here? What do you know about Kira?"

There was a long moment of silence. "Those are almost," said the man, still smiling his languid smirk, "three different facets of the same question. But you seem confused, Agent Dracien, so I will try to answer them. I am L."

Drake waited patiently, but nothing more was forthcoming. What in the hell did that mean? He was pretty sure by now the guy was totally nuts on top of being high as a damn NFL blimp. "Is that supposed to mean something?"

"L" only shook his head, grin growing marginally wider. "Not at all," he said pleasantly. "I know quite a great deal about Kira. That, arguably, is why I am here."

"What… waitasec…" Drake's eyes narrowed as he tried to remember. "L? Like that guy on TV back before Kira went public?" Come to think of it, he'd actually heard M refer to L at one point during a Kira inquiry. Detectives with single-letter pseudonyms were either the hip way to investigate, or there was some sort of organization that employed the both of him. He'd been pretty young when Kira had first shown up, but he remembered now the little media stir that L had caused back then. "That L's is dead, isn't he?"

"Yes," L replied without missing a beat. "He is. Sorry for the confusion."

Drake eyed him carefully, totally at a loss. If this _was _the same "L", he was obviously in a pretty bad way mentally. If he'd been… screwed with… too badly, then he wasn't going to be any help in getting them out of here. But he _might _have some useful information. Drake decided to take that strain of thought and run with it, sitting back more comfortably on the desk and crossing his arms.

"I didn't know much about L," he explained. "I was only about fourteen at the time. The whole Kira thing was weird, and spooky. But you still hear about him sometime. There's this independent agent that my organization works with sometime, goes by the handle of M. You think that might just be an L copycat?"

L was silent, but his mirror gray eyes suddenly sharpened. That was interesting. Whether or not this was really the same "L", he evidently thought he was.

"M?"

Drake nodded, counting his heartbeats. "I've never met him. Not sure anybody has. Operates by phone, so far as I can tell." He tried not to fidget, remembering that junkies were easier to work with if they subconsciously accepted that somebody else was in control. Keeping his nerves from showing in his face would have to take up some of his focus. "Definitely anti-Kira, as well."

L's eyes lay wide and unblinking, and Drake could see the questions in his distant gaze. All he said, though, was "Of course..." and clinked the chains in order to curl more tightly in his seat, pressing the fingers of one hand thoughtfully to his lips. Drake noticed a subtle twitch, starting in the bony shoulder and causing the muscles in the pale neck to jump. His stomach twisted again, in sympathy rather than disgust.

"How much do you know about what… er, what's been going on?"

"As much as has been on the news," said L, indicating the screens with the arch of one skeletal finger. "Enough, I think. The world seems to have become a good deal less interesting."

Drake rubbed his eyes, feeling the beginning drums of a headache setting in. "The news will always lie," he said dully. "Kira's not as accepted as the media likes to pretend he is. I—we've been working to put him down for a long time."

"Do you think he can be stopped, really?" L tilted his head, causing his choppy bangs to fall into his eyes. "Ask yourself this, agent Dracien; what if the world needs Kira? Perhaps it's true that subservience is freedom. Fear of death is a motivator like none other."

A moment passed, during which Drake tried to figure out exactly what this guy thought he was saying. You did not sit in the basement of a dictator's mansion, sliced up all to hell, and talk about how great he was. "I think that's shit," he said firmly. "I'm not exactly humanity's biggest fan, but Kira hasn't just put a leash on axe murderers, he's clamped down on everybody. The stock market can't move one way or another because everybody's afraid to spend their money. He doesn't rule people, all he does is… is take away their choice. Their freedom to make decisions, and take chances, and _live._"

The fingers on L's mouth drummed softly. He didn't blink. "Do you believe in God, agent Dracien?"

"No." He was, though, getting a little pissed off. "But if there is any kind of higher force out there, Kira is not his right hand. Or any part of him. Period."

"I see." And that was it, although the glassy black gaze slid elsewhere, gazing mutely at nothing.

Drake shut his eyes, and listened to the increasing roar of his own blood in his ears. He stood up to drag his attention elsewhere, and very nearly fell right back on his ass as his legs outright refused to cooperate and a shock of pain tore up his spine. _Fuck, _his mind hissed. The hell? Maybe he'd been a little more beat up than he'd thought. Maybe Kira's goons had drugged him, too.

Or maybe he was just exhausted, and being tazed and locked in a basement for Christknows how long had sucked a little strength. Just maybe.

He blew a sigh out through his teeth, fingers drumming on the side of the desk. Hell, even the tiny lockpick hidden in his right glove had been removed, they'd been so thorough. The thought of faceless hands prodding his own unconscious body, stealing his tools and then replacing the clothes that had hidden them—it truly made him sick, a furious tightening in his throat to accent the already nerve-wracked undulations of his stomach. He was getting out of here, he decided, collecting his money whether he'd earned it or not, and retiring to someplace ridiculously sunny. Florida would suit him.

"Listen," he said after a few moments of picturing himself on a beach with three or four fantastically-proportioned women lounging on a towel. "I'm gonna look around. There's probably another way out of here, or they wouldn't have you chained down. You, ah… sit tight." Like the guy could disappear by the time he'd got back, leaving him alone with the spooky lights and the oily smell of old sweat. L looked at him briefly, and gave an unhelpful shrug.

The basement was, for the most part, the same long stretch of rock, but he noticed a cut-away wall that created a smaller back room. Behind it, waist-thick pipes lined the far wall and connected to a water tank, and a rusty tap jutted from the concrete into a tiny metal bathtub. There was a small steel toilet in the corner. Drake had done his time in a cell, back in the U.S. during his teenage years, and this was as effective a prison as any. He kicked at the pipes halfheartedly.

The drain in the center of the floor was about basketball-sized, and he wondered if he could pry the metal grate off and squeeze through it. He imagined sliding through the pipes, black and wet and claustrophobic. He'd had to sewer-dive before, during one of his more unpleasant heists, and all drains had to eventually lead to a water line. But he didn't have his tools, or any idea of the layout of the lines; Kira was, he'd learned today, both more secure and more psychotic than originally projected. Maybe he'd try it, but not until he was desperate. And not until the headache went away.

There was the matter of L, too; he wouldn't make it through an escape. Drugged and starved, not to mention naked, the rust in the pipes would tear his skin apart. Drake could leave him, try his luck with getting the authorities involved in this mess.

He thumped a fist on the wall in tired frustration. This would take a while.


End file.
